


Up And Over We Go

by HopeRomance



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Battle Scenes, Ben Solo Lives, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Devoted Reylo, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, M/M, Miscommunication, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey Needs Therapy, Rey is going through it, Rey is the Queen of Repression and it's time we dealt with that, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, it's not about the fight choreography it's about the FEELINGS, suffering but not for too long, the author may be playing fast and loose with canon but she's not really sure
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-04-20 14:07:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 45,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21982381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopeRomance/pseuds/HopeRomance
Summary: “Be with me,” she whispers. Her throat aches with every word, but she pushes through it. “Be with me…”Surely she didn’t make it this far — they didn’t make it this far — only to lose each other now...Palpatine is dead. The war is ending. But for Rey and Ben, the work has just begun. A TROS fix-it fic.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Poe Dameron/Finn, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 50
Kudos: 252





	1. Chapter One

It’s freezing cold. Bits of gravel are digging into her knees. She can feel a slight trickle of sweat — or is it blood?— dripping down her neck. But none of those things matter right now. In fact, they’re barely occupying any space in her mind. What’s taking up the most of her attention is the warm, still body lying beneath her. Time seems to have stopped and moved at hyperspeed all at once. 

Snippets from the past half hour flash through Rey’s mind… using both lightsabers to deflect Palpatine’s attack… collapsing… waking up in Ben’s arms… kissing him… Ben kissing her back… and then him falling, sinking to the ground before she could catch him. 

And now she’s here. Kneeling above him, hands on his ragged sweater, not entirely sure what she’s doing. She can’t tell if he’s breathing or not. Does it even matter? He pulled her from the brink — she can do the same for him. She must. 

“Be with me,” she whispers. Her throat aches with every word, but she pushes through it. “Be with me…” 

If all the Jedi who ever lived could come to her aid before, surely they can help her just one more time. Surely they can push him away from whatever galaxy lies beyond this one and send him back to her.

Surely she didn’t make it this far — _they_ didn’t make it this far — only to lose each other now. 

Nothing changes. 

The room is still silent apart from the occasional thud of crumbling bricks. A slight breeze blows dust in her eyes and irritates her nose. He is not moving. 

Maybe there was too much damage… maybe there simply isn’t enough life left for the both of them… 

One more try, she tells herself. One more, and then she’ll accept the unacceptable. 

“Be with me,” her voice is so raspy she can barely hear herself. Her eyes fill to the point that Ben looks like nothing more than a dark, watery blob on the ground. “Be with me…” 

She shuts her eyes, no longer able to face one of her deepest fears. She has no clue what went on above her head while she was down here battling Palpatine. For all she knows, she might have already lost every person who ever mattered to her… Finn, Poe, Chewie, and now… will there be anyone there to greet her when she makes her way out of this evil place? Has she been doomed from the very start to be alone in this life? 

Something happens. A shift. It’s so small that she thinks she may have imagined it. Did his chest move or did her hand simply twitch? Does she dare to hope? 

“Ben,” she leans down so that her mouth is right next to his ear. “If you can hear me, if you’re there, give me some sign.” 

She waits. 

Maybe it was her imagination after all. Maybe after the stress she has endured today, this is just too much for her mind to process. Maybe she should leave before she goes mad… 

She pushes herself back to an upright position and looks down at him one more time. He looks so much younger like this, so much more fragile, than she ever thought he could. She wonders if this is what he looked like every time he went to sleep. She wishes she could have found that out for herself. 

Suddenly — pressure on her right hand… on top of her hand. She whips her head to the side, heart pounding in her chest. And what she sees makes her heart stop all together. 

His hand is over hers. Completely covering hers, actually. Slowly, he moves his thumb down to circle around her wrist. It’s a light grip — she can barely feel the calluses on his palm — but it’s a grip nonetheless. 

“Ben?” her voice catches in her throat. 

He squeezes gently, but that’s more than enough for her. 

Every tear that was threatening to spill runs down her cheeks now. But they’re not the tears of mourning she had feared she’d shed — they’re tears of joy, relief, gratitude. She laughs. She doesn’t even mean to and it hurts like hell but she can’t stop laughing. Even moving a muscle is agony and her arms are shaking, but she slides her free hand up to his shoulder and squeezes, willing him to move once more. 

“Ben,” she says, when she’s gained enough control of herself to speak again. 

And then she’s gifted with the most beautiful sight in the world. 

He opens his eyes. 

Nothing, nothing could prepare her for the sheer elation that takes over when she sees him looking up at her. He looks exhausted, but he’s alive. He’s alive and he’s looking at her with a gaze so soft that she thinks she might spontaneously combust. 

“You’re here. You’re back,” she chokes out as she reaches to brush a strand of hair off his face. 

He grins just a little, never taking his eyes off of her. 

“You didn’t think it would be that easy to get rid of me, did you?” 

Together they start to find their way out of Palpatine’s throne room. It’s slow work, partly because they’re both weak with fatigue and partly because the rubble is blocking every clear path there once was. 

Rey keeps her arm tightly wrapped around his waist, and Ben keeps his arm around her shoulder. She’s not sure who’s keeping who upright. Maybe it’s an equal effort from both of them. That would make perfect sense for them, she thinks. Dyads in the force, perfectly balanced in everything they do, literally keeping each other alive. 

The weight of the two lightsabers seems to be increasing with each step she takes. Ben offered to carry both or at least one, but he’s already moving so clumsily, as if his body is suddenly too big for him, that she doesn’t want to burden him with even another ounce. 

“How much further do you think it is?” Ben winces as they hike over a particularly large pile of rocks. 

He injured his leg badly when he was thrown into that pit, and Rey was able to bring him back to life, but not heal him entirely. 

“We must be close,” she says, gritting her teeth through her own aches and pains. 

They make their way back to flat ground and Ben’s leg nearly goes out from under him. He manages to brace himself against a wall before he falls and takes her down with him.

“Do you need to take a break?” Rey asks, running a soothing hand up and down his back as he struggles to catch his breath.

“No,” Ben pants. “We should get out here. We have no clue who else might have survived.” 

“We’re not exactly difficult targets. If someone wanted to attack, they would have done it by now.” 

Rey motions to the silent, empty ruins to emphasize her point. 

“You have to remember that I spent years being trained to see a threat around every corner,” he says. 

“That’s made you paranoid.” 

“It’s also kept me safe.” 

Ben shuts his eyes and Rey can feel the effort he’s expending to steady his breath. 

“You didn’t seem too worried about threats when you rushed in here to help me.” She runs her hand up his back once more and moves it to the nape of his neck, massaging it gently. 

“I didn’t have time to be worried. I knew what I had to do and I did it.” 

“And I’m so glad you did.” 

He opens his eyes again and meets her gaze, a depth and intensity in them that she’s only seen a few times before. 

“So am I,” he whispers. 

She wants to kiss him. More than anything right now she wants to reach up, grab his face, and pull him down so his lips can meet hers. She wants him to wrap his impossibly big hands around her waist. She wants to stay like that for a very, very long time. 

But she’s fairly certain the effort from doing any of that would kill the both of them. So she settles for simply placing a hand on his cheek. 

“We’ll keep each other safe, how about that? We’ve already had plenty of practice doing it.” 

His mouth twitches upward, as much of a smile as he can muster. Then he turns his head and presses his lips against her palm. 

“We’ll keep each other safe,” he echoes. 

They stop whenever either of them needs to, so it takes much longer than they should, but eventually they find themselves standing in front of the X-Wing. They’re both drenched in sweat, caked in dirt and dust, so tired they’re shaking. But they’re here, and Rey is so happy she feels like she could cry again. 

“It’s going to be a tight fit,” she says, looking up at Ben, who’s swaying slightly. 

“It won’t have to be for long,” he sighs. “Just drop me off at the first remote planet we find and I’ll begin my exile.” 

“What?” 

Rey’s heart starts hammering in her chest again. Exile? What is he thinking? 

“I could easily be sentenced to death for the things I’ve done. My only other options are to go into hiding or to be exiled. I’d prefer if it was self-imposed.” 

“No,” she says, trying to fight back the panic bubbling up inside her. “Absolutely not. You’re not leaving me after all of this.” 

Ben looks down at her. 

“What other choice do I have?”

She can see the sadness in his eyes. The grief, the despair, the pain. She cannot let him do this. Not to her, not to himself. 

“You can stay with me. We can go back to the Resistance base together,” she says. She tightens her grip on him as a silent way of telling him she’s not letting him go. 

“I’ll never be welcome there.” 

“I’ll tell them that you are. I’ll tell them about everything you’ve done for me, for our cause. I will make them see you for who you really are.” 

Ben shakes his head. He takes a deep, heaving breath before he speaks. When he finally does, his voice is choked as if his whole throat is tight. As if he’s holding back tears. The light shifts and by the glint in his eyes, Rey can tell that’s exactly what he’s doing. 

“I’ve been a horrible person. I’ve done horrible things. I don’t expect to ever truly be forgiven.” 

Rey moves so that she can grab his free hand with hers. She squeezes gently, just as he did so many hours ago. 

“That’s the thing about forgiveness, Ben. It’s never too late to ask for it.” 

She takes a step — just a small step — towards the jet, and hopes with every fiber of her being that he’ll follow her. Not just to the X-Wing, but all the way back to the Resistance. 

She looks behind her and sees him standing there, looking like a child and a hardened man all at the same time, tears cutting fresh tracks down his filthy face. For a second, she thinks he won’t move. 

But then he does. 

And slowly, carefully, they walk hand in hand into the future. 


	2. Chapter Two

If it weren’t Ben’s lap she’s halfway sitting on, this flight would be almost unbearable. The X-Wing was only designed for one person and that had been painfully obvious as Rey and Ben climbed in and attempted to share the seat as respectfully as possible. The end result being that Ben is perched on the left and Rey is on the right side of the seat, her legs and upper body partially on top of his. 

Steering the jet from this position is awkward, but she manages well enough. She’s not exactly comfortable, but it does feel nice to have Ben so close to her, especially when he’s sleeping so soundly she’s felt compelled to check that he’s still breathing more than once. The fact that he’s able to sleep like this at all is a testament to how worn out he is. She knows firsthand that returning from the brink of death is an exhausting experience. 

Without having him to talk to, she finds herself utterly alone with her thoughts for the first time in a while. This is nothing like the trip from Ahch-To to Exegol, where all she could think about was stopping Palpatine. And that was less of a thought and more of a steady pounding in her head — her own personal war drum. All she could focus on then was the mission that much be accomplished by whatever means necessary. 

But now, in the silence, with the stars and planets stretching out endlessly before her, her head is clear and she can focus on anything she wants. 

What is she going to say when they arrive at the base? Ben was right — they won’t accept him as easily as she tried to make it sound. They very well might not accept him at all. And who could blame them? How many people in the Resistance were hurt or lost homes or loved ones because of his actions? How many people saw him and could only ever see him as the monster he was shaped into? 

If she didn’t know him the way that she knows him, if she couldn’t feel his soul like it was a part of her own, she doesn’t know how receptive she would be to having him around either. 

Unintentionally, a giggle escapes from her mouth. Then another. It’s wholly inappropriate for the situation and she knows that, but she’s laughing and she can’t stop. 

Was it really just a day or so ago that she was fighting him in the Death Star and stabbing him with her lightsaber? Was it really that recently that she fought a Sith vision of herself, and he smashed a Wayfinder, and she tried to throw her lightsaber in a fire? Not so long ago, she didn’t even have a last name and now she’s a Palpatine, one half of a dyad, all of the Jedi. How could so much be so different so quickly? 

She tries to stop laughing, but the harder she tries, the harder she laughs. She can hear the laughter turning manic, then hysterical, then into broken sobs, but it’s as if she doesn’t have control over her own body anymore. 

She feels as if she’s simply sitting next to herself, watching herself lose control and hoping she’s not losing her mind. 

No, she’s not going insane, she decides a moment later, when she finally managed to take a breath. Her brain simply is not able to process everything that’s happened all at once. 

So she’ll deal with it in bits and pieces. 

So recently it’s almost comical, she _was_ fighting Kylo Ren. She stabbed Kylo Ren. She healed him and she left. 

And then Ben came to help her. Ben saved her life.

And now she’s going to help him rebuild his. 

She told him — she promised him — that she would make the others welcome him. So somehow, that’s what she’s going to do. She’s not a fool. She knows it won’t happen immediately, but maybe over time, they’ll be able to see him for who he is and not who he was. 

It doesn’t take long to touch down at the Resistance base. There’s an empty space that almost seems as if it was left clear for her. 

Inside the X-Wing, everything is silent. But everything around the jet is a flurry of motion. People are running toward each other, embracing, laughing, crying, sometimes all at once. She can see Chewie not too far away — Wookies really do stand out in a crowd. Finn and Poe will probably be nearby, but even if they’re not, they’ll be together. She’s sure of that. 

She scans the crowd for one more familiar face, though she already knows deep down that she won’t see it. 

Leia is not with the revelers, or comforting the mourners, or conferring with the strategists. She’s not welcoming Resistance members back or overseeing the care of injured fighters. She she’s not waiting for Rey or her son. 

If she was alive, she would have felt the shift in the Force. She would have known that Rey had prevailed over Palpatine and that Ben had returned to the light. 

And she would have been waiting for them. 

Does Ben know with the same certainty that she does, that his mother is gone? He must. He must have known it the second it happened. 

The full impact of the loss will hit her later. For right now it’s a dull ache that’s swirling around with all of the other conflicting emotions that she’s not totally sure how to deal with inside her. 

Rey takes a deep breath and prepares to get out of her seat. There’s no more time to stall. It’s not that she doesn’t want to reunite with her friends, it’s simply that she has no clue what she’s going to say. With everything that’s happened, to all of them, what words could even be said? 

She unclicks the seatbelt and slowly starts pulling her legs off of Ben. She doesn’t realize until she moves them how shaky they still are. Every ache and pain that dulled while she was sitting is slowly returning. 

Just as she’s about to fully pull herself off the seat, Ben stirs. 

A small part of her had thought he’d sleep through the whole day. If he could sleep in a moving jet surely he could sleep in an idle one. 

But there he is, eyes mostly open, head lifted up as much as it seems he can manage, gripping her hand. 

“Hi. We’re here,” she says, suddenly embarrassed that her grand plan was to leave him alone in here for an indeterminate amount of time, right after telling him she wasn’t going to leave him alone. How would he have felt when he eventually woke up? 

“I can sense your unease,” he frowns. “You don’t have to let me stay here. If you regret what you said earlier, I’ll understand.” 

“No,” she snaps. “You asked me to join you so many times, but it was always the wrong way. Now I’m asking _you_ to join _me._ The right way. I’m just not sure what I’m walking into.” 

Ben squeezes her hand a little more tightly. 

“My mother is dead,” he says. 

The bluntness, the truth, of his words elicit tears that well in her eyes. 

“I believe so,” she replies, not bothering to hide the way her voice shakes. 

“On Kef Bir, I heard her voice. Then I felt it. I think you might have felt it too. But I knew it for certain in those minutes I spent dying. I saw her. She was waiting for me. 

He’s rested his head on her shoulder, his face turned into her neck so his words are a little muffled. 

“She was waiting? For you to become one with the Force?” she asks, 

“No,” he inhales deeply. “I don’t think that was it. I think she was waiting to tell me to go back.” 

“And you did.” 

“For once, I was able to do what she asked of me.” 

They stay silent for a few minutes. It’s the last peaceful moment either of them are likely to experience for a while, and Rey wishes she could prolong it just a bit more. But there’s work to be done and it won’t happen inside this jet. 

“I should go out first,” she sighs. “I’ll let them know everything that’s happened. Prepare them.” 

“For me.” The look of guilt in Ben’s eyes is unmistakeable. 

“Yes,” she says. “I’d rather they not start shooting at you on sight.” 

He presses his lips to her shoulder. 

“Thank you,” he whispers. 

“Thank me later,” she says. 

She gently pulls herself away from him and opens the door to the X-Wing. As she steps out of the jet, she looks back once more, just in time to see Ben fully slide into the seat, slouched enough to be somewhat inconspicuous. He gives her a slight smile as he watches her go. 

It shouldn’t surprise her that she’s able to pick her friends out of a crowd as easily as she does. They’ve spent so much time together that she’d be able to recognize them anywhere. She walks through the crowd, feeling herself pick up speed. By the time she actually sees Poe and Finn — standing close together as she expected — she’s broken into a full run. 

They see her a half a second after she sees them and before she knows it all three of them are hugging, hands clasped together. 

She shuts her eyes ,and for what must been the millionth time today, it seems impossible that she’s alive and so are they and the worst of this whole thing is finally over. 

“Welcome back,” Poe says, when they finally all pull away from each other. “Been a hell of a day.” 

“Understatement of the year,” Finn says, rolling his eyes, but shooting a warm smile at Poe. 

“I can’t believe you’re both okay,” Rey sighs. 

“We can’t believe you’re okay. All we could see was lightning and explosions for a while.” 

“That sums it up, more or less.” 

“I wish we could have been down there to help you.” 

“You helped more than enough.” 

“But for you to be there all alone—“ 

“Well, I wasn’t entirely alone.” 

“What do you mean?” Poe asks. 

Rey can feel her heart hammering in her chest. This is the moment. She has to tell them, and explain it well enough that they’ll understand. Words have never come to her as easily as action does, but her words cannot fail her now. 

“I mean,” she says, willing her voice to steady itself, “that I was not alone down there. In fact, if I had been alone, I would still be in Exegol, buried under a pile of rubble and certainly not alive.” 

“But how is that possible? We didn’t see anyone go that way.” Confusion is written all over Finn’s face. 

“And I was in communication with all of our people. Nobody mentioned going to find you.” Poe’s face is mirroring Finn’s. Their twin expressions would be amusing under different circumstances.

Suddenly, she realizes how dry her throat is. It’s been at least half a day since she last had a sip of water.

“You wouldn’t have seen him. He wasn’t one of our people. He is now.” The words are getting progressively getting harder and harder for her to say. 

After everything she’s endured, how could this be so frightening? 

“Well who was it?” Finn asks, bending down a little so he’s at her eye-level. 

“I’ll introduce you if you swear you trust me,” she says. 

“Obviously we trust you. C’mon, I’d like to shake the hand of the man who helped us win this thing,” Poe presses. 

She takes a deep breath and locks eyes with Poe and then with Finn. 

“It was Ben.” 

“Ben,” Poe mutters. “I don’t think I know a Ben. Ben… Ben who?” 

They look at her, expectant. It’s only one word… 

“Solo.” 

Poe frowns as understands washes over Finn’s face. 

“Ben— Kylo Ren?!” Poe shouts. He’s loud enough that a few people nearby look over.

“Quiet,” Rey snaps. 

“Are you insane?” Poe whisper-screams. “You brought Kylo Ren back to a camp full of innocent people who spent the past several years doing everything they could to fight him?” 

“I brought Ben Solo back.” 

“He’s the same person!” 

A small vein is pulsing in Poe’s neck. Finn puts a hand on his shoulder. 

“Let’s give Rey a chance to explain,” Finn whispers. 

“You’re right,” Poe sighs. “There’s gotta be a reason she’s done something so reckless and irrational.”

“Once I explain you’ll see it was neither of those things,” Rey says. 

She looks around, trying to find a more secluded place for their conversation. There’s a bench off to the corner. She leads them to it, feeling an odd mix of relief and a sense of urgency. 

As soon as they sit down, she launches into an account of everything that happened from Ahch-To to Exegol to the long trip back to the X-Wing. Finn and Poe don’t move. They keep their eyes locked on her, entirely rapt. 

“I truly would have been dead without him,” Rey emphasizes once she’s gotten thought the whole story. “I actually was dead for a minute or two.” 

“I thought so,” Finn says. “I felt it.” 

“You—“ 

“We’ll talk about it later.” 

He felt it? Does that mean he’s… Well he’s right — they should talk about it later. 

“Keeping secrets?” Poe says, finally pulling his eyes from Rey to look at Finn. 

“We’ll _all_ talk about it later,” Finn looks to Poe before returning to Rey. “So what now?” 

Rey shuts her eyes and gathers her thoughts. Things have gone well so far. Nobody’s interrupted or protested or stormed the X-Wing to forcibly remove Ben. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to like anything she says from this point on. 

“I’m not asking you to be his friend right away,” she starts, “or even to like him. But he is on our side now and he has more than earned a chance to make amends.” 

“How are we supposed to even start to trust this guy?” Poe says. She can tell it’s a struggle for him to keep his voice down. “Do you know what he’s done?” 

“Of course I know, and he knows, and we’re bonded in the Force so I can feel his constant regret and guilt over all of it.” 

Finn squints. 

“So, bonded in the Force? That’s a real thing?” he asks. 

“A very complicated thing, but yes. Please. All I’m asking is for you to give him a chance.” 

The two men look to each other and Rey can see the silent conversation in their eyes. A chance. That shouldn’t be too much to ask, should it? 

Finally, Poe sighs and turns to look at her. 

“If you truly believe this is the right thing to do, I’m willing to take the risk. But he’ll have to be monitored, round-the-clock security, at least for a while. I won’t put any of these people in danger. Not after everything we’ve been through.” 

She can feel all the muscles in her body relax. It’s as good of an answer as she could have hoped for. 

“Thank you,” she launches herself at Poe and pulls him into another hug. 

“Not that you’ve ever really listened to me before, but be careful with him. With his history of violence and — well obviously his parents were good people — but the family member he’s always taken after, his grandfather—“ 

“Mine was worse.” 

“What?” Poe pulls back to look at her. 

“There’s one more thing I need to tell you both.” 


	3. Chapter Three

“So. Palpatine. Emperor Palpatine. The undead Sith Lord. Evilest guy in the galaxy. He’s your grandpa?”Finn’s question breaks the long, stunned silence that has fallen over Rey, Poe, and himself. Rey is just grateful that somebody has finally said something.

“Yes,” Rey sighs. “I know. It sounds ridiculous.”

“You’re right about that,” Poe scoffs.

“It’s a lot to take in.”

“Right again, that’s twice in a row.”

“Does anyone else know about this?” Finn whispers.

“Luke knew. So did Leia. Ben found out just a little before I did.”

“Well that explains why he was so desperate to get to you. Of course he’d want a Palpatine on his side.”

“Don’t do that,” Rey snaps. “It’s an insult to him and to me.”

“Sorry,” Finn mutters. “I didn’t mean—“

“I wasn’t expecting any of this to be easy, but in all the time we’ve known each other, I’ve never given you a reason not to trust me.”

“Well you do have a history of running off on your own, charging into dangerous waters— sorry, not helping,” Poe cuts himself off at the look on Finn’s face.

Rey had thought that saying the whole story out loud to some one else would make it feel more real, but it’s still just as bizarre as when it was happening. Perhaps even stranger.

She’s spent so long taking things as they come, addressing every challenge like it was it’s own separate piece of a whole, that stringing it all together feels wrong. As if she couldn’t possibly be the same person that all of these things have happened to. And in a way she’s not. She’s not the scavenger on Jakku anymore, or the apprentice on Ahch-To, or even the fighter on Kef-Bir who was trying so desperately to deny everything she knew to be true. Everywhere she’s gone, everything she’s done has changed her. Sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtler ways. But they’ve been changes nonetheless.

She’s tired. Her head is spinning. All of the adrenaline that had been keeping her functioning is rapidly fading away. Even sitting up straight feels like a massive effort.

Right now she feels less like all the Jedi and more like a roasted porg.

“Where is everyone else?” she asks, mostly just to stop Poe and Finn from asking any more questions.

“Rose is trying to restore the rest of Threepio’s memory. Maz is helping with triage. And Chewie’s…“ Finn looks in the direction Rey saw Chewbacca earlier, but he’s not there anymore. “I thought he was—“

A very distinctive roar cuts Finn off. All three of them whip their heads in the direction of the noise and Rey’s heart stops at what she sees.

Chewbacca is standing at the side of the X-Wing, in what is clearly a fit of rage. From this far away, she can’t quite see Ben, but surely he’s aware of Chewie’s presence. And Chewie is aware of his.

The ruckus has drawn the attention of several other people, though no one is daring to get too close. That’s good at least. That means she has a chance to get to them.

Rey pushes herself off the bench, ignoring the shaking in her arms.

“Rey, wait,” Finn says, as she uses his shoulder to stabilize herself.

“You know she won’t,” Poe sighs.

She doesn’t waste time arguing with them, partly because she knows they won’t change her mind and partly because she knows they’ll follow her anyway. And she’s right.

She pushes through the crowd as politely as possible, walking as quickly as she can without breaking into a full run. Finn and Poe are close behind, flanking her on either side.

They’re not far. Chewie hasn’t calmed down at all, but at least he hasn’t stormed into the jet and ripped Ben apart. Yet.

Good sense would tell her to stay far away from an enraged Wookie, but she seems to have run out of any of that for the day.

“Chewie!” she shouts, knowing she’s still too far away for him to hear her over his own yells.

Just a few more paces, a few more seconds and she should be able to—

Chewbacca wrenches the door of the X-Wing open and Rey stops dead in her tracks. If he decides to kill Ben, he will be too fast for her to stop him. She could try to use the Force to throw him off, but she’s not sure she’s in control enough to do it without hurting anyone. And based off Ben’s physical and mental state, she doubts he’d even put up a fight.

She feels a hand on her shoulder — Finn’s no doubt — but she keeps her eyes fixed on the jet.

Everything happens in slow motion. Chewbacca leans over the seat, his massive size nearly shielding Ben from view. Ben puts his hands out, and from this distance she can’t be sure, but it seems like he says something. Chewbacca doesn’t move. Neither does Ben. And then, slowly, Chewie drops his arms. He makes a noise, but it doesn’t contain the anger it did before.  
Rey feels her legs moving before she’s even consciously aware she’s walking. She’s become disturbingly used to her mind and body feeling disconnected from one another today.

The crowd parts more easily for her now. She can hear the murmurs. At least some people are sure to have recognized the large, dark-haired man sitting amongst them.  
She makes it to the X-Wing just in time to catch what sounds like the end of a conversation.

“I know,” Ben whispers. “I know. And you can’t imagine how badly I wish I could take it back.”

Chewie growls. He’s reminding Ben of the time he almost killed him.

“Part of me wishes you had. The world would be a much brighter place today.”

“The world is brighter today because of you,” Rey cuts in. She can feel the regret and the shame and the heartbreak rolling off of him in waves. She can sense his thoughts and she doesn’t like where they’re headed.

Chewie whirls around to face Rey. He points at Ben, then cocks his head. A question.

“It’s okay,” she says. “Whatever he’s told you is the truth. He’s on our side now.”

Ben pulls himself out of the seat and gingerly climbs out of the jet, wincing the whole time. Chewbacca moves at the sound, creating a barrier between Ben and the others.

“I’m willing to do whatever it takes to prove myself. And to make up for what I’ve done in whatever small way I can. Please,” his voice breaks, “please just look at me.”

Chewie locks eyes with Rey and she nods in what she hopes is an encouraging manner.

Finally, he turns around. Rey moves from behind Chewbacca, nerves on end, ready to interfere if need be. But her caution is unnecessary.

Ben is using one hand to steady himself against the side of the jet. With the other hand, he carefully, slowly reaches out until he’s finally just barely touching Chewie’s arm. She watches as the two of them lock eyes. She doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t think she could breathe even if she wanted to right now.

“It’s me,” he whispers, his eyes deep and dark and sad, young and weathered, hopeful and broken. “It’s Ben.”

Even the air feels still. There’s no longer the slightest hint of a breeze. If she’d thought time was moving slowly before, it was nothing compared to this.

Time practically stops. Then Chewie makes a quiet, indecipherable noise. And then a small sad smile plays on the corners of Ben’s mouth. Everything moves very slowly until it suddenly moves very fast.

Chewbacca pulls Ben into a hug. If she couldn’t see the way Ben’s hands were clutching onto Chewie and the slight shuddering of his shoulders, she might think he was being smothered to death.

It’s easy to forget that Ben knew Chewie as a little boy, that their history goes back so much farther than hers does with either of them. But it’s clear as day right now. Making Ben look small is not an easy task, but he looks like a child again in the giant Wookiee’s arms.

The moment feels too intimate to observe so closely. A family reunion no one was meant to see.

Rey steps back, filling the space between Finn and Poe.

“If you think this is enough to make me like him, it’s not,” Poe mutters.

“There’s two of us that you trust, that trust him. That must at least be enough to make you hate him a little less,” Rey looks up at Poe.

His face is set in a hard frown, as if he’s struggling to solve a difficult equation.

“I told him I’d help give him a chance,” she continues, “Please give him that. If not for him, for me and Chewie.”

Poe opens his mouth, then closes it. He shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath.

After spending most of the past day in perfect mental sync with Ben, it’s so difficult for her to not know what people are thinking.

“You can see how this would be hard,” Finn interjects, when Poe has opened and closed his mouth another two times, apparently incapable of finding the right words.

Finally Poe opens his eyes. He looks over at Ben, who’s still half-buried in Chewbacca’s fur.

“He looks pretty badly injured,” Poe sighs. “He shouldn’t be putting so much weight on that leg.”

Rey feels the start of a smile spread across her face. It’s not the open-armed welcome she’d secretly been hoping for, but it is a show of concern. And maybe for now that’s enough.

Before she even has a chance to thank Poe, the scene in front of them changes in a slight but significant way.

Ben’s leg seems to give out under him. Chewie notices the shift just in time to keep him from banging his head against the side of the X-Wing as he goes down. The Wookiee bends over and scoops Ben up, holding him like an over-sized baby.

If she wasn’t fighting back a rush of fear, she might find humor in how ridiculous he looks. But now all she can think about is the possibility that this whole day may have simply been too much. She herself feels like she could easily slip into a coma, and she was in far better shape than he was at the end of things. How many times has each of their life forces been transferred today? How much does he have left? Is that even how it works?

“Ben!” she yells, although she can already feel that he’s completely unconscious.

“It’s okay, look, Chewie’s got him,” Finn says, placing another hand on her shoulder.

She focuses on what she can control, which right now, is her breathing. A deep inhale, a long exhale, over and over again until she feels more steady. She ignores the way her own head is swimming and the way her legs seem to be screaming at her to sit down.

Chewie roars softly. He needs to know where to take Ben.

Poe sighs a deep, weary sigh.

“Take him somewhere discreet. The fewer people that see him the better.”

Everything seems to tilt. Her deep breathing isn’t making Rey feel better anymore. It’s suddenly very hard to focus.

“Don’t let him die,” she gasps out. She’s not sure when she grasped onto Finn’s arm so tightly, but it seems to be the only thing keeping her upright.

“Make sure he gets good care,” Poe says to Chewie. His voice sounds oddly muffled. “Maybe Maz will know what to—”

If Poe keeps talking, Rey doesn’t hear it. Her vision blurs, spots of light dance in front of her eyes. She feels herself sink to the ground and she feels Finn pull her back up.

He's right next to her ear, calling her name.

“I’m fine,” she mutters. It takes the last of her strength do so. “Just need… to lie down…”

She’s fairly certain she hears her name one more time before everything goes black.


	4. Chapter Four

It’s dark when Rey finally opens her eyes. So dark, in fact, that she has to blink a few times just to be sure her eyes are actually open. She’s lying flat on her back and for one sickening moment, she worries she’s dreamed the whole past day. Her mind takes her back to Exegol, back to the horror of lying on the ground, collapsed before the Sith throne, alone and about to die. Everything that came after was some cruel hallucination, a revival and a rescue that never happened.

_No,_ she tells herself. _It was all real, and it all happened, and you are safe now. Palpatine is dead and you are alive. Your friends are alive, Ben is alive, you are alive._

She repeats that in her mind once, twice, three times, and again. She thinks the words until she remembers that they’re true. She replays her journey, recalling each excruciating step that she took from that throne room to now. She tells herself the story of her own survival until she feels a small wet drop trickle from her eye down her cheek. She thinks the words until she believes them.

And she wonders how long it will be before the dark stops terrifying her.

She feels less exhausted now than she did when she landed on the Base. How many hours ago must that have been at this point? Could it be that she lost the entire rest of the day after she practically collapsed in her friend’s arms? That would explain why it’s so hideously dark in this room.

Her eyes are adjusting, albeit slowly, and she can just make out the dimensions of the room she’s found herself in. It’s small. The bed she’s lying in takes up one corner of the room and she can feel something wrapped around her arm that must be keeping track of her pulse or her temperature or something. Next to the bed is a monitor, no doubt hooked up to whatever is around her arm. The room is mostly bare except for that, save a few trays against the wall opposite her that are stocked with bandages and other supplies.

This is one of the medical treatment rooms — that’s not hard to figure out. She’s never personally stayed in one — the injuries she’s sustained in training have never been severe enough to land her an overnight stay — but she’s been inside one of these a time or two and recognizes it all the same.

This is one of only three private rooms on the whole base — most people are treated in the triage center Maz set up when the base was first formed.

It’s possible, Rey thinks, that she’s sharing one of these walls with Ben. He might be a mere few inches of concrete away from her. But shouldn’t she be able to feel him if he’s that close?  
She reaches out with her mind, waiting to feel that small, indescribable sensation that comes when the force bond she shares with Ben locks into place. She searches, trying to find that link to him, missing it for the first time in what feels like forever.

She’s not nearly as tired as she had been earlier. Already she can feel her strength returning to her, though she doubts she’ll actually have the energy to get out of this bed and walk around for a while yet.

There’s nothing coming from the other end of the bond, at least not right now, so she settles for trusting her friends, believing that they will care for him as one of their own. If not for his sake, then for hers.

Rey pushes herself up to a sitting position, feeling the deep ache in her muscles and hearing the soft pops of her joints as she moves. It takes so much effort just to do something as simple as sit up straight. She’s not used to physical exertion being this difficult for her, but then again she’s never endured quite the amount of abuse she’s put her body through recently.

She takes a moment to slow her breathing and savors the feeling of fresh, clean air in her lungs. There’s so many trees on this planet, the air always feels pure and good, even inside this tiny room.

Her energy returns to her much faster than it would have a few hours ago. That’s good. That means she’s already healing.

She reaches behind herself and pulls the pillow up so it rests behind her back, forming a barrier between herself and the headboard of the bed.

It’s quiet in her little room. All she can hear is the sound of her own breathing and the light beep beep beep of the monitor beside her.

If she’d had any question about it being nighttime, she’s now sure. Nothing is ever this silent or this still unless it’s night. There’s a shift in the air when day slides into night, a quieting of all the things that spend their time in the sun. The force is always there, of course, humming underneath it all, alive and eternal in its own way, wrapping itself around her and everyone else and all the planets in all the galaxies.

It’s that soft vibration, that life source itself, that she holds on to, clutching it as it anchors her to herself.

Not for the first time in the past few days, she thinks to herself how ridiculous it is that she’s still alive. She tries not to think too long or too hard about all the things that should have killed her — not just today, but every day since her birth. She focuses on clearing her mind, a skill she’s honed through her years of Jedi training. She empties her head of all the extraneous thoughts, nods off somewhere in the middle of it all… until the sounds of not-too-far-away voices catch her attention.

If they were nearly anyone else, she’d be able to tune them out. But she knows those two voices, could pick them out in any crowd, just as easily as she picked out their faces when she got out of the X-Wing.

Finn and Poe are right outside her door.

“Just let her rest,” she can hear Poe say. “We have all the time in the world to talk to her later today.”

“Trust me, she’s awake,” Finn whispers back.

“But we don’t have to be. C’mon, let’s just go back to bed.”

Rey can practically hear the way Poe must be rolling his eyes right now.

“She’s been alone for hours, days, the least we can do is not leave her alone right now. Besides, we’re supposed to be up in a few anyway.”

The door to her hospital room clicks open and Rey turns to see the silhouette of her friends standing against the predawn sky, which is already shifting from inky black to a softer navy blue.

“Finn was right, I am awake,” Rey rasps, her voice not sounding like her own. It’s scratchy both from disuse in sleep and overuse during all the hours that led up to that.

Finn and Poe walk all the way into the room. Her eyes have adjusted well enough to the dark that she’s able to see Poe grope around the wall for a few seconds before finding a light switch and flipping it on.

Harsh fluorescents flood the room and Rey squints against them, the brightness seeming too harsh for this time of day. Still, she’s grateful to not be engulfed in the near-pitch black anymore.

“Glad to see you’re up,” Poe says as a greeting.

“Told you she would be,” Finn mutters.

“I’m assuming you felt it?

“Yes, in fact, I did. And isn’t now a great time to talk about that too?”

“I think it is,” Rey chimes in before those two can get too deep into their back and forth.

She looks around the room, and realizing there are no chairs in sight, motions for the two to sit on the edge of her bed.

Finn sits immediately and Poe grudgingly perches next to him, barely stifling a yawn.

“So,” Rey says, “what is it you’ve been meaning to tell me all this time?”

She’s fairly certain she already knows. She’s thought there was something stronger than mere intuition or luck that’s been guiding him for a while. She’s thought, at times, that she could feel it, that awareness that she herself has been trained to be so in tune with.

Still, she’s filled with a certain awestruck wonder when he actually says the words out loud.

“I’m Force sensitive,” he says.

She reflects his smile back at him.

“How long have you known?”

“I wasn’t sure until recently, but I think maybe some part of me has always known, from the minute I defected from the First Order. I think it’s what drew me away from there. And what drew me to you,” he turns to look at Poe. “To both of you.”

She did so much of the talking yesterday, it feels nice to be the one listening this time around. Rey leans back and lets the men regale her with a step-by-step breakdown of everything that happened from the time they started tracking her flight in Luke’s X-Wing to the moment they knew they’d won the battle.

Finn talks at length about how fearless Poe had been even in the face of defeat, Poe tells Rey about Finn’s brilliant idea for a ground attack. She listens as they debate minor details — which ship showed up when, if Rose went left or if she went right and Jannah went left, exactly how large that final explosion was — and she feels, not for the first time, incredibly grateful that somehow, somehow, they all survived.

She asks a few questions here and there, fills in holes whenever they’re not quite sure what happened or how. But for the most part, she just listens and enjoys their presence.  
They talk long enough for a small shaft of light to filter in from under the door, until Rey is certain that the sun is shining brightly overhead above all the other, ridiculously fortunate people who lived to see the end of the battle.

They talk and talk and she’s fairly certain they would continue talking for the rest of the day, but Maz throws the door open, bringing with her, as Rey suspected, the bright light of early afternoon.

“I have been looking everywhere for you two,” she scolds Finn and Poe before turning her attention to Rey, “and you are supposed to be resting.”

“I am resting, I haven’t left this bed all day,” Rey protests.

Maz’s disapproving stare is all the motivation Rey needs to make her slide down a little deeper into bed.

“Out, out now,” Maz shoos Finn and Poe out of the room, when she notices them making no moves to leave. “If I don’t get a chance to check up on her, then she won’t get a chance to be cleared and I’ll have to keep her here indefinitely.”

The thought of even one more night in this small room, isolated from everyone else, not able to see or talk to her friends, or Ben…

“Get out and let me prove to Maz that I am perfectly okay,” Rey snaps at Finn and Poe, who are still standing in the doorway.

The two men leave and Maz sets to work checking Rey’s temperature, examining her vital signs.

“I am perfectly okay, yes?” Rey asks after several silent seconds.

“You seem to be,” Maz says.

“Then why did I collapse yesterday?”

“You were up for almost forty-eight hours with no sleep, no food, you fought in a battle, and — as I understand it — died, came back to life, and brought someone else back to life. It’s a wonder you didn’t collapse sooner.”

“So I was just tired? Doesn’t this seem like a bit of an overreaction then?”

“It does,” Maz finally stops her ministrations to look Rey in the eye. “But I wanted to make sure it was just exhaustion and nothing to do with your connection to Ben Solo. Considering the fact that you’re already awake—”

“How is he?” Rey can feel her heart pounding in her chest. She’d been doing such a good job of not worrying all morning, but just hearing his name is enough to bring it all back.

“We already set his leg and you are not going to heal it for him until your strength is all the way back up.”

Rey pushes herself up and peels off the layers of blankets that have been shrouding her.

“Where is he?”

“The other private room, but— sit back down!”

Rey stands, clutching the side of the bed, all of her muscles shaking, for another second in what she hopes is a show of reluctance. In truth, she would have sat down without being told — she didn’t realize how much energy she would expend just by jumping out of bed.

She lowers herself back down with false hesitancy but genuine frustration.

“There’s no point tiring yourself out to go see someone who’s still comatose.”

“He hasn’t woken up yet?”

It’s an odd mix of sensations that Rey is feeling. On one hand, her heart has dropped all the way down to her stomach at the news that he’s still out. But on the other hand, the tight knot that her stomach had tied itself into at the sound of his name is loosening.

Rey’s not sure what face she’s making, but it must be concerning enough for Maz to take a step toward her and inject a little more care into her typically matter-of-fact way of speaking.

“Aside from the injuries, he seems to be fine too. Finn told me the abbreviated version of what happened to you out there. It seems like Ben sustained deeper injuries than you did, but there’s nothing to be worried about yet.”

“He shouldn’t have to be alone,” Rey swallows the lump in her throat.

“Chewbacca hasn’t left his side. And I’ve been checking on him regularly.”

“You’ll tell me when he wakes up?”

“I have a feeling you’ll already know.”

Rey takes a deep breath, and it feels just as good as that first deep breath did hours and hours ago. Perhaps the mere ability to breathe will never seem like less than a miracle to her for the rest of her life, she thinks.

She takes another deep breath just because she can, letting it out on a slow exhale and marveling at the way her heart rate slows when she does it.

Maz watches, and it strikes Rey that perhaps Maz also thinks it’s a miracle she’s still breathing.

“Get some more rest. I’d like to keep you here one more night, but you’re free to walk around the base whenever you feel up to it.”

Maz makes her way back to the door, then stops and turns to look at Rey one more time, the faintest hint of a smile ghosting across her face.

“You’re not the only one who’s glad to have him here,” Maz says softly. “I was there, with Leia when she left this world. And I do believe she did it, trusting that there would be people who were glad that her son has finally returned home.”


	5. Chapter Five

She had never thought a shower could feel so good until one hour ago. Washing off the grime and dirt and crusted-over blood that had been covering her like a second skin was a near-rapturous experience. It didn’t matter that the water was cold, or that her muscles shook from the effort of keeping herself upright with no support, or that the myriad tiny lacerations all over her body stung when she cleaned them. No, all that had mattered to her, standing in that tiny shower, was that she was standing in a shower at all. 

The only thing that could have made it better was if she’d felt that connection snap back into place. If she’d had some sign that Ben was awake and functioning, even if she couldn’t physically see him yet, then that last shred of worry coiling in her stomach could finally loosen. 

Still, she’s grateful just to have clean skin and fresh clothes as she walks through the woods of Ajan Kloss with Finn and Poe. 

Several yards away, in the main clearing the base has used as their central gathering area for so many months, the mood is restless. The celebrations of yesterday seem to have died down — now everyone seems to be caught between mourning the dead and trying to figure out what exactly comes next. Rey could feel it rolling off of all of them, the joy, the misery, the confusion, the relief. It was too much all at once. 

And so, she and her friends are strolling through the trees instead. Near enough that they can hear if anyone needs them, but far enough away that they’re afforded some semblance of privacy on the crowded base. 

She’s heard, by now, all about the way so many reinforcements appeared seemingly out of nowhere, how right when they thought all was lost, hundreds of people from every edge of the galaxy showed up. And despite the losses they suffered, there are still hundreds of new people here — some displaced, some homeless, some simply looking to continue helping. A year ago, when there were so few Resistance members left that they all fit in the Falcon, she never would have guessed that someday their numbers would be so large there would barely be enough room for all of them on one base. 

Then again, there are a lot of things she never would have guessed a year ago. 

“Where are they all sleeping?” Rey asks as she watches a group of people she’s never seen before walk past. 

“People with bigger ships have basically converted them into barracks. You should see the Falcon. You can barely walk through the halls without stepping on somebody,” Poe says. 

“Good,” she smiles. “I’d hate to think anyone had been forced to sleep in the dirt.” 

Before she can say anything else, a familiar voice rings out. 

“Rey!” Rose shouts. A second later, she’s bounding towards them, her small form hurtling through the trees and into Rey’s outstretched arms. 

“I can’t believe you’re actually okay!” Rose exclaims as she crushes Rey to her. 

“Mostly okay,” Rey chokes out, most of the air in her lungs gone. 

Rose loosens her hold just enough for Rey to catch her breath. 

“And I can’t believe you two kept her away from me for so long,” Rose scolds. 

“It was less than one day,” Poe says at the same time that Finn mumbles out a “we weren’t even allowed to see her until this morning.” 

Rose finally breaks the hug, and for a brief moment, Rey thinks that this is one of the few reunions she’s had and is still bound to have that won’t be tinged with angst. 

And then Rose’s smile falters and that brief moment ends. 

“I heard about everything,” Rose is quieter now. “How much of it was true?” 

She doesn’t need to say more than that for Rey to understand the question underneath the question. 

“It’s true,” she sighs. “All of it.” 

Rose shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath. 

“Rey,” is all she says when she finally exhales. 

It’s difficult for Rey to fight against the defensiveness she immediately feels at the ton of Rose’s voice. She doesn’t like feeling this way — chastised, like a child, like she’s done something wrong, which she _hasn’t_ — but she knew, didn’t she? She knew she’d have to explain herself more than once. That she’d have to answer to more than Finn and Poe. She’d already been luckier than she’d expected to be, having Chewie and Maz understand. 

Why should she expect anyone else to take it quite so well. 

“He killed people, Rey.” 

“I’ve killed people.” 

“Innocent people. There’s probably not a soul on this base who didn’t lose someone because of him.” 

It’s the disappointment in Rose’s voice that cuts Rey deeper than anything else. Shehad been prepared for frustration or incredulity or even anger, but she was not prepared at all for that unmistakeable, melancholy tinge of disappointment. 

“I know that,” Rey says, trying not to notice the way Rose seems to have subconsciously clutched at the pendant that always hangs around her neck. “Trust me, I know. But there’s also not a soul on this base who would still be alive now if it wasn’t for him.” 

“I can’t— I won’t be his friend, if that’s what you’re hoping for. I’m not even going to promise that I’ll speak to him.” 

“I understand,” Rey says. And it’s true — she does understand. She has to understand. 

“It’s going to get out, you know. There’s already talk, a few rumors. But for the most part, since you haven’t made any kind of statement, no one really knows what happened.” 

“I guess I’ll have to think about what I’m going to say.” 

“I think everyone will want to hear from you. Before they start to draw their own conclusions.” 

She knows Rose is not ready to accept having Ben here. She knows Rose may _never_ accept his presence. But the fact that she’s already offering — advice? A warning? Both, perhaps? — is enough for Rey. 

“And that goes for you, too, General,” Rose says, shifting her gaze from Rey to Poe right behind her. “We need a game plan moving forward.” 

“I’ll call for a meeting day after tomorrow, I swear,” Poe groans. “Really should’ve thought of that.” 

“Why wait?” Rey asks. “If there’s more to be done then shouldn’t we be getting started as quickly as possible?” 

Despite the fact that her legs are gently shaking from the effort of standing for so long, despite the fact that she’s been in life-threatening danger more times than she can count over the past few years, despite every rational part of her brain telling her that she should take it slow, take a break… there’s an uncontrollable fire still burning somewhere deep inside her. Some part of her that instinctually wants to run, to fight, to _do something_. 

If there’s even one member of the First Order out there who needs to be brought to justice, any group of sympathizers or would-be killers hiding, plotting an attack, still posing a threat to her and her friends… her hand practically aches to hold a lightsaber in it once again. 

“Tomorrow’s supposed to be a big ceremonial day,” Finn replies. 

“For what?” 

“Funerals, a memorial for Leia — everything was so hectic before we managed to track you and since we’ve gotten back there hasn’t really been time… and a thing for us,” Poe says, hesitating at the third item on his list.

“Us?” Rey asks. 

“It’s to honor us. As war heroes.” 

How Poe manages to keep a straight face as he’s saying that, she has no idea.

“Please tell me you didn’t plan this yourself.” The prospect of standing in front of a crowd to receive a medal is already horribly embarrassing to her, and it hasn’t even happened yet. 

“No, no, it was Lando and Maz,” Poe says. “They insisted, said something about the good ol’ days. But they promised it would be quick.” 

“We took down an entire government, we can handle a few minutes of a ceremony,” Finn reasons. 

“I guess that’s what I’ll have to tell myself,” Rey sighs. 

* * *

The sun is swiftly sinking past the horizon as Rey sits around a fire, eating a small dinner with her friends. 

Their little spot in the woods had not turned out to be quite as remote as Rey had imagined — less than an hour after Rose found them, Kaydel and Jannah had as well. They hadn’t had any news Rey hadn’t already been told, aside from reports on a generator that blew a fuse and how several of the Resistance’s newest members had been asking if they could finally meet the young Jedi who defeated Palpatine. 

It’s the blown fuse that finally coaxed Rey out of her not-so-secluded spot (despite Rose’s insistence that she could fix it on her own and Rey should just rest), and the reason she’s now here in the main clearing with everyone else. 

She’s shaken at least a hundred hands, learned and forgotten at least fifty new names, heard a recap of “The Battle of Exegol” as they’re all calling it from at least a dozen different perspectives. 

No one would hold it against her if this was all too much at once. If she drifted back to a quieter place, avoided all the the people, the names, the stories, just for one more day… 

But it’s not too much for her. In fact, she finds that she wouldn’t mind shaking a hundred more hands and hearing a hundred more voices. Because it’s just so incredible that she gets to meet any of them at all. 

She’d gotten so used to being alone, had spent so many years with no company but her own, it doesn’t matter, she decides, if she’s still physically exhausted, or if she can’t quite remember which planet the kind woman sitting next to her is from. She has a family, a _giant_ family and that itself is something she never dreamed of for herself, much less all the rest of what her life has become. 

The last of the sunlight has faded, and the fire crackles against the night sky,illuminating the faces of her friends. She watches as Kaydel whispers something to Rose and Jannah, sending all three of them into a fit of giggles. It’s odd to see them so carefree — and she never imagined she’d see any of them giggling — but it’s a sight she could easily get used to. Their work isn’t done — she knows that — it’s likely going to be months of dealing with the last of the First Order, the loyalists, the power hungry individuals she’s sure will rise up and try to take advantage of all this unrest, and then even when that’s over there will be the politics and the government and the fact that if they’re not careful a new evil could easily take the place of the vanquished one.

“Hey,” Finn bumps her shoulder with his. “Still with us?” 

Rey snaps out of her reverie, realizing she’s been staring blankly at the fire for a little longer than is normal. 

“I’m here,” she smiles as she bumps his shoulder in response. 

The times will surely be hard, but at least she has her friends, several of her mentors, all the people she’s fought beside and fought for and—

_Ben_. 

The connection snaps into place in an instant and it’s so jarring she nearly drops her bowl. In fact, if her reflexes were just a percent duller, her feet would certainly be covered in stew right now.

He’s awake. He’s conscious enough, _strong_ enough to send just a whisper to her through their bond. 

“Whoa, hey,” Poe leans across Finn to look at Rey. “That’s one of my favorite bowls.” 

“You’ve said that about, like, seven different bowls,” Finn retorts. 

“Rey?” Poe asks when she doesn’t respond. 

She knows she should say something, but she can’t seem to make herself form the words. She’s too overcome by relief, tension she thought she’d already lost dropping out of her second by second. 

He’s awake, he’s alive, their Force bond still exists. She’d hadn’t even realized she was worried it might not until this moment, now that she’s feeling it again. 

“Rey? Hellooo…” 

“He must be awake,” Finn whispers. 

Rey nods, grateful that Finn has always been able to read her so well. 

“The magic mind connection?” Poe asks. 

“I should—” Rey half stands, bowl still in hand before sitting back down. “I should probably go—“ 

She puts the bowl down, then moves to stand back up before Finn puts a hand on her shoulder. 

“I’m sure he’ll understand if you finish your meal first,” he says. 

“I know he’d understand. I’m not going because he wants me to, I’m going because _I_ want to,” Rey replies. 

She looks around the base. Everyone is involved in their own conversations, no one would notice if she slipped away, it wouldn’t be odd for them not to see her again until tomorrow… 

“I’m really trying to get it,” Poe huffs. “I know you say he helped. I know you say he’s on our side. But not everyone is going to see it that way.” 

“I know.” 

“Hell, it’s hard for me to see it that way. And look at you, trying to sneak off so you can talk to him without anyone noticing, because even telling everyone he’s here might be dangerous if it’s not done properly. And for your sake, Rey, I’m doing my best to do it properly. For your sake, not his.” 

“Once everyone knows, I won’t have to sneak around will I?” 

“In theory no…” Poe scratches his head and Rey can see him trying to gather his thoughts. “But I guess what I’m saying is, is this all really worth it? All the trouble you’re going to put yourself through just _trying_ to defend your… what even _is_ he to you exactly?” 

It’s not a question she was expecting, although now that she thinks about it, it’s a question she absolutely should have been prepared for. 

Ben’s been so many different things to her over the years — boogeyman, enemy, arch-nemesis, potential friend, ally, but now… 

Now Rey realizes she has no idea how to refer to Ben. Companion is too casual, Soulmate, though probably true, would sound a touch dramatic spoken out loud. If she’d thought ahead, she would have talked this over with him while she could, before she’d have to identify exactly what their relationship is to other people. 

They belong to each other, she’s sure of that much. And he’ll understand whatever she chooses to say — whether or not he agrees with it is a wholly different issue. So really, she should have no fear in choosing a label. There are no wrong answers. Nothing is set in stone. 

“He’s my equal,” is what she finally settles on. “He is my match in every way. My balance. We are whole people on our own, but combined we form two halves of a new whole. And perhaps we always have.” 

“So… he’s your soulmate.” 

“I thought that would sound too dramatic.” 

“Did you hear what you said instead?” 

Rey shakes her head, hoping it’s dark enough out to mask the flush she feels building in her cheeks. 

“I’ll see you all soon,” she says, giving Finn and Poe each a final shoulder squeeze before she slips away from the dimming light of the fire.


	6. Chapter Six

It’s a short walk from the main clearing to the private room she knows Ben is being kept in, but time seems to move exponentially slower with every step she takes. 

A little over a day is not so long to go without seeing someone. She has no reason to be this eager to see him right this minute, especially when he could very well have fallen back asleep by the time she actually reaches him. 

She has no reason for her heart to be pounding, no reason to be thinking so deeply about what she might say to him, what state he might be in when she finally slings open the door. She has no reason, except for the fact that it’s not just “someone” she’s going to see. It’s him.

The door feels a little bit heavier than it actually is — one of the few remaining indications that she’s not back to full health yet — but she still manages to heave it open and step inside. 

“You came.” 

Just the sound of his voice feels as refreshing and exhilarating and _good_ to her heart as the shower felt to her body earlier today. It fills up some space in her that she hadn’t even known existed until now. 

A few florescent lights keep the room unnaturally bright compared to the growing darkness outside. He’s half propped up on a bed that’s dangerously close to being too small for him, his hair is messy and sleep-rumpled, he’s hooked up to several more machines than she was — including something that’s keeping one of his legs entirely from view — and his face is set in a stoic, if not a little pained, expression. But he’s here, and alive, and she can hear the smile in his voice even if it hasn’t quite reached his mouth. 

“Of course I did,” she says. 

_Overwhelming relief. Joy. Gratitude. _

She feels all of it rush through their bond. And it’s tinged with something else… something like… guilt? 

“I didn’t mean to pull you away from your friends,” he murmurs, and the guilt pulses more strongly through the bond. 

“If I hadn’t wanted to be here, I wouldn’t,” she says simply. 

She can both see and feel him relax by just a fraction. 

It’s still so new, to be this close to him with neither of them brandishing a weapon or trying to figure out what their next move should be. With all those distractions, she’d never noticed just how strong their connection is. Or perhaps it’s strengthened itself and is getting stronger still. 

She takes a few more steps into the room and lets the steel door click closed behind her. 

“How are you feeling?” She looks around, trying to find a place to sit among the several medical apparatuses filling the room. 

It’s either the floor or the edge of his bed, and while she doesn’t relish the idea of sitting on the floor, she’s genuinely not sure if there’s any room for her to even perch on the edge of the bed. 

“I can’t say this is the best I’ve ever felt. Physically, at least.”

She looks around again. It’s not as if a chair will magically appear, but she still kind of hopes one does somehow. Just as she’s about to settle for the floor, Ben grips the edges of his bed and pulls himself a little to the side. His injured leg seems completely immobilized, but the rest of him moves enough to leave a sliver of space on the mattress open. 

“You don’t have to,” she says. 

“I know.” He gingerly reaches an arm out. 

Rey notes the wince that flashes across his face before he schools his expression back to something more neutral so quickly it seems like second nature to him. Because it probably _is _like second nature to him. How long has he been doing that, she wonders. How long has he been policing his own face, refusing to show even a moment of pain? 

Long enough, she guesses, that he seems to do it subconsciously, even now, even here, where there’s absolutely no threat of danger, no one watching for a sign of weakness. 

“Are you sure?” she asks. 

He nods, arm still outstretched, eyes softening. Her mind flashes to another time when they’d been alone in a room together, about this far apart, with his hand reaching for hers. She hadn’t been able to take it that time, but there’s nothing stopping her now. 

She takes the few steps needed to close the gap between them and laces her fingers between his. 

He sighs so quietly she halfway thinks she imagined it. 

Rey sits down, more than a little pleased to see that there’s just enough space for her to sit as long as she stays pressed closely to his side, their joined hands resting between them. 

“Did you have a good day?” Ben asks. “Maz told me you were well enough to be up and about.” 

“She was supposed to let me know when you were awake,” Rey frowns. 

“It’s probably good she didn’t. I was in and out of consciousness for a while. If you’d come here, you would have just found me passed out, most likely.” 

Well, that would explain why she hadn’t felt the Force bond all day. 

“I got to catch up with everybody, meet some new members,” she says. “It was tiring but good. How’s your leg?”

“Several broken bones, torn ligaments, walking on it for so long didn’t do me any favors, but we didn’t have any other choice,” Ben frowns.

Rey instinctually reaches for the leg in question before pulling her hand back — if it’s in that bad of shape, surely he wouldn’t want anyone to touch it.

“You’ll be okay though?” 

“I should be,” Ben hesitates. “Although — and I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean it — but Maz did very briefly threaten that if I do any more damage to it, they’ll have to chop it off.” 

“What? That— that would horrible.” 

“I don’t know. I spent so many years wanting to be like my grandfather, maybe losing a limb would serve me right.”

She looks up, about to chastise him for saying such a terrible thing about himself… and then she notices the slight upward curve of his mouth. 

A smiling — joking? — Ben Solo is certainly something she could get used to.

“Don’t worry,” he continues. “Other than the stitches and bone setting and threats, my day hasn’t been the worst.” 

“You weren’t too bored? For the parts of it you were awake for.” 

“Not at all. Chewbacca kept me company.” 

“That’s nice.” 

There’s a pause, and his grip on her hand tightens a little, and the emotion in his voice is apparent when he finally speaks. 

“It was.”

She returns the pressure on her hand with a squeeze of her own and cranes her neck to look up at him, both startled and entirely unsurprised at the wetness in his eyes. 

Rey leans her head on his shoulder, careful not to put too much of her weight into it as Ben takes one steadying breath then another. 

“Are you sure you have enough room with me here?”

Ben nods his response. 

“I promise you I’m more okay than all of this makes it seem,” he says. 

She’d been too overwhelmed with just the sight of him to even notice until now that his torn, black tunic is gone. It’s been replaced by a new shirt — soft, cotton, cream-colored.

Rey lifts her head and looks up at him. 

“You look nice in this,” she says. “I’ve never seen you in anything but all black ensembles.” 

He’s even paler than usual so it’s impossible to miss the pink tinge that blooms on his cheeks. 

“My fashion sense has always been limited.”

As quickly as it appeared, the brightness in his eyes fades and is replaced with a furrowed brow as his lips press together in a thin line. 

“What is it?” She tightens her grip on his hand at the same moment he lets out a huff. 

“Most people still don’t know I’m here, do they? I saw the way Maz and the medics were slipping in, like they didn’t want to be noticed.” 

She won’t lie to him. She’s already promised herself that much. So she opts to say only as much as she needs to. 

“Some people know you’re here, but not everyone, not yet.” 

“When will they?” 

“There’s been a conversation,” she says carefully, “about telling people in a couple of days. During a meeting.” 

“A meeting?” 

“Yes.” 

“With everyone on the base?” 

She nods, refusing to break eye contact. She can see him looking deeper, groping through the bond for the meaning behind her words. But it would do no good for him to feel the nerves and uncertainty that she feels about what tomorrow might hold. 

“A meeting, with the entire Resistance, about me.” 

“Well there’s more items on the list to discuss than _just _you—“

“A trial.” 

“Don’t be dramatic.” 

“You’re worried it’s a trial.”

She takes a breath. The fluorescent lights wash out some of the color of his eyes, making them seem more dark and uniform in their shade of brown. But she can still see the depth behind them, can still see the fear right underneath the carefully crafted stoicism he’s struggling to keep a hold on. 

Well, she’s promised herself she won’t lie to him. 

“Yes,” she sighs, “I am worried. But I shouldn’t be, because it all will be okay.” 

“And if it’s not? If they truly don’t want me here?” 

“Then I’ll hold another trial, or non-trial. I’ll hold as many of these meetings as I need for them to see sense.” 

She can feel that prickling sting behind her eyes a second before she feels Ben’s thumb gently stroking the back of her hand. 

It’s ridiculous, she thinks, for him to be the one comforting her, when he’s the one who’s still injured, the one who’s going to be on trial—

No, it’s not a trial and she won’t let herself think of it that way. 

“Rey,” Ben says. She can hear the effort it’s taking for him to keep his voice even. “They’re well within their rights to tell me to leave. To be honest, they’re well within their rights to do much worse than that. If they don’t want me here, I can’t stay. I can’t inflict any more pain than I already have on these people.” 

The stinging in her eyes gets worse and despite her attempts at blinking rapidly and looking up at the ceiling and scrunching her eyes shut when the other two techniques don’t work, tears trickle down her face. 

How could he possibly think leaving is an option when they’ve gone through so much, survived against every odd, just to get here? When they’re finally starting to understand the true depth of this connection they have? 

“I’m not planning on leaving,” he murmurs into the top of her head. “Trust me, I’m not. You say they’ll forgive me, I believe you. You know them far better than I do. But I’m just saying, on the off-chance they don’t… it wouldn’t really scream ‘I’m reformed, and I respect you all’ if I forced my presence on everybody.” 

He has a point, she knows he does, but even entertaining the thought of him disappearing again is too much to handle right now. 

She feels him press a kiss to the top of her head before he continues speaking. 

“We’ll just have to do a very good job of convincing everyone, that’s all.”

“We?” She wipes at her face with her free hand and twists a little so she can look up at him again. 

“Yes. You and me. We.” 

“No, no. I will.” 

“It’s my trial—“

“It’s _not_ a trial—“

“It’s my not-a-trial,” he rolls his eyes, “I have to be there.” 

“You’re still bedridden.” 

“I’m sure I could walk if I wanted to,” he says, less than convincingly. 

“Maz threatened to cut off your leg.” 

“I could manage for a few minutes.” 

“Could you?” 

His hesitation is all the answer she needs. 

“You will stay here and rest.” She tries to put as much authority as she can behind her voice without outright using the Force to command him to listen to her. “You will get better and I will speak on your behalf.” 

He huffs, and Rey is certain a pout is forming on his lips. It’s such a childish look on him, so at odds with his broad frame and large features and manly hands, one of which is still brushing rhythmically against hers. 

“I’m going to have to speak for myself eventually.” 

“I know. And you’ll have plenty of time for that. _After_ the meeting.” 

She can finally see the faintest hint of a smile returning to his lips. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get tired of seeing that. 

He unlaces their fingers and moves his arm to wrap around her shoulders, pulling her even closer to him. She nuzzles a little into his chest and can feel heat emanating even through the heavy cloth. He’s so warm, so much warmer than he was when they made their way out of Exegol, warmer even than he felt during the flight on the X-Wing. 

Rey thinks absently that she probably wouldn’t even need a blanket if she were to ever sleep in the same bed as him. 

She’s not even sure where that thought came from but she can already feel a slight flush in her cheeks. She’s not the type to blush easily, but even lying here innocently, so close to him, alone and _safe_ for once, is a more intimate situation than she’s ever been in with… anyone. 

“Am I going to get to meet your friends soon?” he asks, breaking her out of her reverie.

“I hope so. It would be nice for you all to be able to chat now that you aren’t trying to murder each other.” 

She feels Ben tense underneath her for a second, but then he lets out a breath and squeezes her a little tighter. 

“Tell me some more about them? I want to make sure I know who’s who,” he says. 

So Rey does. She tells him about Finn and Poe and Rose and Kaydel and Jannah. She tells him about all the times they’ve looked out for each other, all the ways they’ve helped each other over the years. There isn’t time to go over everything — she’d need hours, days, weeks maybe, to do that — but she tells him enough to give him a good idea of who they all are to each other. 

Somewhere in the middle of it all, she finds herself lying on her side facing Ben, who’s twisted his torso in what she hopes isn’t an uncomfortable position to face her. 

She tells him about Finn’s newfound Force sensitivity as Ben carefully traces little circles on her shoulder. 

She tells him about what good care they’re taking of all the new Resistance members as he moves his hand from her shoulder to the nape of her neck and massages gently there. 

And then she runs out of things to tell him because he’s moved that hand again, but now it’s brushing against her cheekbone with the backs of his fingers and he’s looking at her so softly, she’s forgotten how to form words. 

“I’m still listening,” he encourages when she doesn’t say anything for several long seconds. “I just… like looking at you. Sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” 

“I don’t know.” 

And then neither one of them are talking, they’re too wrapped up in each other for that. 

Rey isn’t sure if she initiated it or if he did this time, but it really doesn’t matter. Their lips are on each other and his hand is on her back and one of her hands is in his hair and she can feel that he’s being careful, can sense that he’s giving her room to pull back, but she doesn’t. 

She’s not even sure when this shift in the way she feels for Ben came — maybe it was on the cold ground of Exegol, maybe in that hut sitting across from each other by the fire in Ahch-To, maybe some time in between all of that — but it came nonetheless, and she’s glad it did. This is all uncharted territory for her, unfamiliar in every aspect. But it’s a comfort to sense the same nerves, the same tentative excitement, that she’s feeling echo through the bond from him as well. 

She opens her mouth and that’s all the invitation he needs to deepen the kiss and slide his tongue against hers. She can feel his hand sliding up and down her back, ghosting across her ribs, moving to her waist. She can feel his hair tangled in her fingers, just as soft as it’s always looked, even after everything he’s been through. And she can feel warmth, all the heat exuding from his body, amplified now that they’re so close, but it’s not just him — she feels warmer than usual as well… 

Rey loses track of time. At some point he moves his mouth to her cheek, then her jaw, then her neck. And then that becomes a pattern all of its own — _mouth, cheek, jaw, neck, mouth cheek_ — 

She has no idea how much time has passed when she finally feels Ben stifle a yawn against her neck. 

“Bored?” she teases. 

“Anything but,” Ben grins, looking up at her. He tries and fails to fight back another yawn, and that’s when Rey notices the dark circles under his eyes.

“You need to rest,” she says as she strokes a stray lock of hair out of his face. “Go to sleep.” 

“I don’t want to say goodnight to you yet,” he murmurs against her jaw. 

Rey hesitates. Truth be told, she’s not ready to say goodnight yet either. But it would be selfish of her to keep him up when he so clearly is exhausted. 

“I could… stay here?” she offers. 

“No,” Ben says, and both the swiftness and finality of his response hit her like a sharp punch to the chest.

“Wait, no, I only meant—“ he continues, and if the look of panic in his eyes is any indication, she must look as deflated as she feels, “I only meant… I don’t sleep well. I haven’t slept well in years. It’s fitful and would be unpleasant for you and I don’t—“ 

“Okay, it’s okay,” she brushes his hair back again. “I’ll see you in the morning. It’s been a long day for me too.” 

He lands one final peck on her lips before she pulls away and finds her footing back on the floor. 

“Goodnight,” Rey says once she reaches the door. 

“‘Night,” he replies drowsily. 

She turns to look at him one last time until tomorrow.

“And just so you know, no matter what happens tomorrow, I’m not giving up on you, Ben Solo.” 

There’s that smile again — careful, soft, sleepier now than it was before — and Rey holds on to that image in her mind as she makes the very short trek from his room to her own little bed. 

She turns off all the lights and tucks herself in, finally noticing the way all her muscles are shaking and her joints are aching. But it doesn’t bother her — she’s better than she was yesterday and tomorrow she will be better than she is today. 

Then, after she’s rolled over eat least three times trying to find a comfortable sleeping position, the bond clicks into place yet again. 

The connection isn’t strong enough for her to see him — they’re both too tired for that — but it is enough to hear him. His voice is like a whisper in her ear. 

“Maybe… we could talk until we fall asleep?” 

“I’d like that,” she replies. 

And that’s exactly what they do, although technically, it’s Rey doing most of the talking. She rambles on about her life on Jakku, answering his questions about how she survived on her own for so long, skimming over the more painful parts, describing her tiny little home. 

She’s not sure how long she talks for, but eventually she feels a slight breeze, which —considering the rest of the air in the room is still — can only be a product of the Force. 

The little breeze brushes past her face and pushes a tendril of her hair back. And then the connection goes quiet and Rey knows he must be asleep. 

No, she thinks as she closes her eyes, there’s no way she’s giving up on Ben Solo. 


	7. Chapter Seven

It couldn’t possibly be that far past sunrise when a loud bang on the door startles Rey out of her sleep. 

“Rise and shine!” Poe calls through the door. 

Rey groans and rolls over. Maybe if she doesn’t respond he’ll go away, just for a few more minutes, just a little longer to put off the ceremony she’s already dreading today… 

But the banging just gets more aggressive. And far too rapid for one person to be doing on their own. 

“C’mon, Rey,” Finn calls. 

Of course. Both of them are out there together. Of course they are. 

She peels herself away from her very warm bed — though not quite as warm as Ben’s chest was, her sleep-addled brain jumps to remind her — and she winces a little when the cold steel of the floor meets her bare feet. 

It’s not nearly as hard to get around this morning as it was yesterday. She’ll be back to running her training course in no time at this rate. Just the thought of getting back to being a productive member of the Resistance is enough to cheer her up. 

She opens the door to find Finn and Poe already dressed and far too alert for the early hour — and it is, in fact, an early hour, as evidenced by the lavender and periwinkle sky behind them. 

“None of the ceremonies are supposed to start for hours,” she croaks out. 

“Ah, come on. Isn’t it supposed to be the way of the Jedi or something like that to be awake and alert all the time?” Poe asks as he pushes past her and walks into the room. 

“A little advance notice would be nice,” Rey grumbles and steps aside for Finn to make his way into the room as well. 

“Do you need these?” Poe holds up the half-shredded rags that were the clothes she wore on Exegol. 

“I guess it’s all too torn to wear again,” Rey sighs. 

“Great. Putting them in the Museum of Heroes I’m breaking ground on today in honor of us all,” Poe winks, and Rey really isn’t sure if he’s serious or not. 

“He’s kidding.” Finn tosses a half-hearted glare Poe’s direction and then turns back to Rey. “We’re here to break you out.” 

“I didn’t realize I was a prisoner.”

“Sorry. Force of habit,” he corrects himself. “The medics said you’re fine so you don’t have to stay here.” 

“Oh,” Rey recognizes but can’t quite explain the way her heart drops at that. “Good. That’s good news.” 

“Finn also had another reason for wanting to come so early,” Poe adds, a glint in his eye. 

“I uh—“ 

Poe squeezes Finn’s shoulder encouragingly. 

“I was wondering if you could take me out to your training course.” 

“Right now?” 

“Just to maybe… go over the basics?” 

She’d considered this as a possibility, that Finn might want to learn how to use the Force. And it was an exciting possibility — it still is — but the sudden realization that she’ll have to be the one to teach him is… daunting. 

Logically she supposes she must have known that she would have to be the one — she is, as far as she knows, the last Jedi alive. 

_No_, her brain corrects her, _there’s another. _

Although now that she thinks about it, she’s not entirely sure if she can classify Ben as a Jedi. He didn’t complete his training — neither did she, to be fair — so maybe they’re both not quite—

“Well?” Finn’s voice cuts off her rambling train of thought. 

“That training course is _not_ the basics.” She can sense Finn’s disappointment at her words before she continues, “But I can walk you through it. Show you what you’re in for eventually.” 

“Okay,” he beams, “great!” 

“I’m coming too,” Poe says, already heading for the door.

“You don’t have to,” Rey says.

“Oh, I know. I just want to get a start on droid-proofing it for all your future outings. BB’s still a little cautious around trees.”

* * *

It’s not hard to tell what they’re trying to do. It’s going to be a long, stressful day where she’ll be very public for much of it, followed by another long, stressful day where she’ll finally have to tell the whole base about Ben. And then the days after that… who knows? 

There’s a good chance this is the only free, uninterrupted time she’ll have for a while. 

So it’s thoughtful of them to take her to a place that’s exclusively hers. To remind her that this place exists, that peace exists. 

She feels completely fine, she _could_ run the whole course if she wanted to, but although she has energy now, she’s not certain how much she’ll have by the end of the day. 

So instead, she settles for walking through most of it with Finn and Poe, explaining the purpose of each part, describing the type of skill each section requires. 

“Ah, so this is where you let my droid get bludgeoned,” Poe murmurs as they pass the fallen tree that hit BB-8 what feels like a million years ago. 

“We’ll have to clear that out of the way next time we come here,” Rey gestures to the tree and shoots Poe a dirty look for good measure. “And he wasn’t _bludgeoned_.” 

“He’s always so dramatic,” Finn whispers conspiratorially to her. 

“You love it,” Poe shoots back. 

She can’t quite place the look on Finn’s face, but she recognizes it, _senses_ the emotion beneath it. She’s not attuned to Finn’s feelings with the same clarity or depth that she is to Ben’s, but she can still sense it — the hesitancy and the affection that goes deeper than friendship.

She also recognizes the tenderness in his voice when he mumbles, “Yeah, I do.” 

After the sky has shifted from the gold-tinged pinks and purples of dawn to a clear bright blue, after Rey, Finn, and Poe have returned from the training course, and after they’ve gone to their respective quarters to change into clean clothes for the day, Rey feels the bond snap into place.

She turns around from the corner of the room she’s facing as she gathers the last of her things, half expecting to see Ben standing right behind her. 

He’s not there, not really… and yet she can feel his presence despite his not being physically in the room with her.

“I know you don’t have time to see me,” he says, and Rey can hear it as clearly as if he actually was right in front of her. 

“Is everything all right?” she asks, hoping he can’t sense her slight anxiety spike.

“Just wanted to hear your voice for a second.” 

“Oh,” is all she manages to reply, and suddenly she’s very thankful he can’t see her so he can’t see the blush she’s certain is forming on her face. 

“You sound tense.” 

“It’s been a long day and it hasn’t even started yet.” 

Rey feels a bit foolish, talking out loud in an empty room, but she’s not sure if she’s able to just think things at him or if she has to physically say them, so she errs on the side of caution. 

“Let me know if you need anything,” she adds as she arranges her hair into something halfway presentable. 

“I won’t.” 

“You won’t need anything or you won’t let me know?” 

“I won’t need anything,” he says and Rey can feel how firmly he means it. 

“Well okay,” she sighs, “but if you do—“ 

“How could I when I already have more than I could possibly ask for.” 

She’s not sure if that’s an incredibly heartwarming or incredibly sad sentiment, and truthfully, she doesn’t have time to figure it out right now. Judging by the noise coming from outside, most of the Resistance has already gathered for today’s events. 

“I know you have to go,” he says, sounding much more steady than she feels.

“I think I do,” she huffs. 

“If you don’t mind, I do have one favor to ask of you.” 

“Anything.” She smiles, forgetting he can’t actually see her expressions. 

“Don’t worry about me today, okay?” 

“Ben, I—“ 

“You have enough going on, and I’ll be completely fine just lying here all day. Tomorrow you can feel free to worry about me. In fact you probably _should_ worry about me tomorrow. But for today just… don’t. Please.”

“Okay.” 

“Promise?” 

“I promise,” she says, trying very hard to make it sound like she means it. 

But if Ben’s sigh right before the connection breaks is anything to go off of, she’s not very convincing. 

* * *

The ceremony she had dreaded the most was the first of the day and went by blessedly quickly. She, Poe, and Finn had stood on a slightly raised platform as Lando said a few words about their bravery and heroism and, truthfully, Rey can barely remember half of what he said, overwhelmed as she was by the sheer amount of people staring up at her, most of whom she still didn’t recognize. It’s still staggering to her to see just how many people showed up for the cause.

And that fact in and of itself had made the entire ceremony seem even more ridiculous to her — everything they had achieved was part of a group effort, an impossible feat if not for all the people who had gathered to honor them. If anything, she should have been thanking them, not the other way around. 

Before she’d known it, Chewie was helping her off the platform and C-3PO was making his way toward her, showing a considerable amount more recognition of her than he did the last time she saw him. 

“Mistress Rey!” he’d exclaimed when he finally reached her, R2 at his side. “It’s so good to see you again. As I’m sure you can tell, my memory database has been fully restored.” 

R2 gave an indignant beep. 

“Yes, yes, of course, R2, it was with a considerable amount of help from you,” he continued. 

“I’m glad,” she said honestly, feeling a rush of relief both at the fact that 3PO’s sacrifice hadn’t been permanent and that she was no longer the center of attention. 

“See?” Poe’s voice came from behind her as he clapped a hand on her shoulder. “Quick and painless, right?” 

“All things considered,” she’d replied. 

And it had been painless, especially compared to the portion of the day she’s now found herself participating in. 

The incredible amount of support they received in that final battle also came at an incredible cost — one which Rey hadn’t fully processed until this moment, as the names of every person who was not fortunate enough to return to the base are read aloud to the crowd. 

She’s given up keeping count, settling instead for simply listening and trying not to be overwhelmed by the crush of grief and sadness she feels emanating off of the several hundred people surrounding her. 

For a fleeting second, she’s jealous of all the people who aren’t attuned to the Force… who aren’t feeling their own grief reflected back at them in unrelenting crashing waves. 

But that brief flash of jealousy gives way to something else — something she’d felt intensely in Ben yesterday, but which belongs only to her now. 

Guilt. 

She was the one who led them to Exegol, she — however indirectly — had a hand in causing the funeral she’s now standing at. 

She hadn’t even known what she was going to find, when she’d hopped in Luke’s X-Wing and flown off to that horrible hidden planet. She hadn’t known what she was walking into, had no way of knowing that her friends would survive or that so many people would show up to fight on their side. 

She’d had no real plan, hadn’t bothered to strategize or think or even consider if there was a safer, smarter way to go about things. She’d just flown, unblinking, straight into danger. And they had followed her. 

Maybe it wouldn’t be enough to thank them for what they did — maybe she should be asking for their forgiveness. 

An arm wraps around her shoulder, squeezes gently, and brings her back to the present. 

“I know it’s tough,” Finn whispers. 

“Tough” doesn’t begin to cover it, but there’s no use, she realizes, in explaining the entire swirl of emotions she’s feeling right now as she realizes that no one — not Finn, not Poe or Rose or even Ben — _no one _in the galaxy could possibly understand exactly what it’s like to be her, to have been her, facing off against Palpatine while everyone she knew and loved fought and died a short but unreachable distance away. 

She had come so close to losing everything, it had all been on her shoulders in those final moments before victory, and no one alive today will ever know exactly how that felt. 

That old, creeping feeling of loneliness that’s plagued her for so much of her life threatens to return, so she focuses on the arm around her shoulder, on Rose standing on her other side… on all the people who survived, who fought for the same ideals that she did, who proved to her that she will never be alone again. 

The sun has passed its peak and is already beginning its slow descent toward the horizon by the time the final names have been read and Poe has assumed his place in front of the crowd.

They’ve shifted seamlessly into the final ceremony of the day, such as it is. 

Surely there were once Alderaanian funereal traditions, but those have been lost to time and war. Leia left no solid instructions on how to proceed with any kind of memorial and a part of Rey suspects she wouldn’t have really cared to have one — not if it would detract from important work that needs to be done. 

But this is the most important work they could possibly do today, she thinks. Honoring the dead, simply taking a day to breathe and absorb both the weight and the cost of what they’ve achieved before they move on to their next tasks. 

And there will be many, many more tasks, and more battles to face. 

_You may be facing quite the battle tomorrow_, her brain reminds her and she forces that anxiety-inducing thought back to the back of her mind where she’s been storing it. 

Tomorrow’s fight is for tomorrow. Today, she reminds herself — yet again — to stay present. 

Poe has finished speaking. He’s been replaced by Lando who is in the middle of an old story — she’s heard it before — about the day he first met Leia, so many years ago. 

It’s been at least an hour since Rey’s moved any more than shifting her weight from one foot to the other and her back has started to ache, but she doesn’t dare move a muscle. Not now. 

She’s too focused on absorbing every word, memorizing everything said about Leia — the princess, the general, her trainer, and the closest thing to a mother she’s ever known. 

She hangs on every word, not only for her sake, but for Ben’s as well. 

She searches for their connection, mentally reaching out, but finds nothing on the other end of it. He’s either asleep and actively blocking himself from their bond — whether that’s for her benefit or his, she’s not sure. 

There’s no burial — Leia became one with the Force and left them no body to bury or burn — so the ceremony effectively ends when Lando finishes speaking and he and Poe place a few lit candles at the edge of the podium, their faint glow an echo of the golden tones of the sunset that is now painted across the sky. 

“Dinner?” Poe says as he rejoins the group, looking decidedly less spry than usual. 

And the guilt rushes back to her full-force, now compounded with exhaustion and the stress of knowing that _tomorrow_ is that much closer to being here. 

“I’ll join you all in a bit.” Rey tries to keep her face neutral. She’s not sure she succeeds. “I haven’t checked on my little section of the cave in days. Just want to make sure all my things are in order.” 

She knows it’s a lame excuse even as it comes out of her mouth, and it’s clear that none of them believe her, but they let her go with a nod and a promise to bring her food if she doesn’t join them within the hour. 

The Tantive IV was destroyed in battle, and now that it’s gone, the limestone cave that used to house it along with the command center and what Rey’s come to think of as her personal research section feels immense. 

Clearly people have been using the space as a place to sleep and store some of their things — the cave has a distinct lived-in quality to it now that it didn’t quite have before. Her little corner, however, has remained untouched. Rey had suspected as much. 

The ancient Jedi texts she spent so long poring over are still in their neat stacks, her tiny cot is still against the wall, a single pillow sitting atop one end. 

Everything here feels comfortable, safe, familiar... more like being home than her little dwelling in Jakku ever did. 

It should be a relief to finally feel like she has somewhere she belongs, but the guilt just won’t stop coming today, it seems. 

She can’t help but look at the evidence of so many displaced people, can’t help but think back to all the names that were read out loud just this afternoon. All the people who will never be able to return home, all the people who don’t have a home to return to. 

And this is neither the end nor the beginning of it. She’s left behind a trail of death and destruction everywhere she’s gone ever since she left Jakku. And — considering there will certainly be more fighting left to do — she’s sure she’ll leave behind more in the coming weeks and months. 

She knows deep down that none of this is explicitly her fault. This is a war. People die in wars, planets are destroyed. That’s an unavoidable fact. She _knows_ it’s not her fault. 

But she can’t help but feel like it is.

And wouldn’t that make sense, for hers to be a legacy of death? Her lineage would suggest it. She knows the history, knows how much havoc her grandfather wreaked on the galaxy… what if in trying to right his wrongs, she’s created her own? What if she has, if nothing else, inherited the capacity for such things? Rey’s mind flashes back to the lightning that came so easily from her hands. It hasn’t happened in days, but then again she hasn’t tried it to see if it still can… 

“Hey.” 

Finn’s voice snaps Rey out of the dark and useless path her thoughts had been going down. She looks up, realizing she’s been staring blankly at a spot on the floor for who knows how long. 

Clearly the distress she’s in is written on her face, judging by the way Finn is looking at her, a bowl of something that’s still steaming in his hands as he studies her face. 

“You never came for dinner so…” 

“Thanks.” She takes the bowl the second he holds it out to her. 

Rey keeps her eyes fixed on the latest compilation of meat and vegetables that’s been put together, but she can feel Finn watching her for several long seconds of silence. 

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Finn asks finally. 

“Not really,” Rey sighs. “I’m not sure there’s even anything to really talk about.” 

“You’re upset.” He doesn’t say it like it’s a question. 

Rey nods, finally meeting his eyes. 

“Look, Rey,” he crouches down to meet her at eye level. “I know how stressed you must be with the whole… thing… tomorrow, but—“ 

“It’s not that,” she shakes her head. “Well, I mean, it_ is_ that too, but it’s just… never mind. It’s nothing, really. I’m being silly.” 

Rey turns back to her food and Finn hesitates for a moment before standing back up. 

“If you’re sure,” he says. 

“I am. Really.” She can’t manage more than a tight-lipped smile that she knows couldn’t possibly look very genuine. 

Finn nods slowly and right when Rey thinks he’s about to turn away and leave her he sighs and opens his mouth once more. 

“I know you like being self-sufficient and I know you’re good at it, but we — me, Poe, Rose, all of us — we all want you to feel like you can rely on us. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but just know that you don’t do us any favors by shutting us out. We want to be there to help you, whatever it is. Always have, always will.” 

“Thank you,” she says. And she hopes he can feel how much she truly means it. 

Finn doesn’t stick around for much longer. After wishing her a good night and imploring her to get some rest, he heads back outside to the Falcon or wherever he and Poe are sleeping, Rey presumes. 

As the night goes on, more and more people fill the cave, settling into their makeshift camps and going to sleep. But, despite her best efforts, Rey is not among their number. 

She watches them — holding a book open in her lap despite the fact that she’s clearly not reading it. She tries not to focus on tragedy and pain and the burden of legacies, but on the hope she has for the future, the plans she has for her life, all the places she’ll travel to when the war is finally fully over… the people — _person_, specifically — she might do that traveling with.

It’s pitch black and silent aside from the staggered breathing and scattered snores of the others sleeping in the cave by the time she reaches out with the Force again. 

The bond snaps into place so quickly Rey wonders if he was waiting for it. 

“How are you?” she whispers into the darkness, feeling silly for the second time today for talking to thin air. 

“Why are you still awake,” Ben says in response. 

It hasn’t even been a day, but just hearing him, knowing for a fact that he’s alive and safe and on the same planet as her relieves some of the tension she’s been carrying all day.

Will she always feel like this, she wonders, every time she hears his voice? 

“I couldn’t sleep,” she sighs.

“You need rest if you’re going to properly defend me at my trial tomorrow.” 

“It’s not a trial.” 

Rey rolls on her little cot from her back to her side. Ben’s voice sounds so close to her that if she shuts her eyes she can almost imagine him next to her. 

“How’s your leg?” she asks. 

“Still attached to the rest of my body.” 

“We’ll count that as a win.” 

“How was it all today?” 

The can hear the subtle shift in his voice, the way the levity in his words has disappeared. It doesn’t take a genius to know that there’s only one ceremony he’s really asking about. 

“I wish you could have been there,” she says. 

“Me too.” 

“I tried opening the bond. I thought maybe you’d be able to hear.” 

“I know. I felt you doing it.” 

“Then why didn’t you—“ 

“Would it make me a coward if I said I just didn’t know if I could bear it yet?” 

The way his voice shakes as he asks the question is enough to bring tears to her own eyes. 

“No, I don’t think it does,” she whispers. “I can tell you about it some time. When you’re ready.” 

“Assuming I’m still here.”

“You will be. Think positively.” 

“That’s still a relatively unfamiliar skill to me,” he sighs.

“Well luckily for you, we’ll have plenty of time to work on it.” 

Ben doesn’t say anything for several long seconds. The silence stretches on just long enough for Rey to mentally check to make sure their bond is still in place. 

And then, the quiver in his voice finally gone, he says, “Okay.” 


	8. Chapter Eight

She’d be lying if she said she didn’t put a little extra care into her appearance today. It’s not like she has a particularly extensive wardrobe, but she’s made sure to wear her cleanest outfit, and has tied her hair up meticulously. 

In the grand scheme of things, what Rey looks like doesn’t really make a difference — what she says is what will be most important. But still. 

She’d woken up with the rest of the base, devoured her breakfast, too antsy to really savor the meal at all, and headed straight to her training course, despite having zero intentions of actually running it. 

She’s fairly certain she could slip into Ben’s room without anyone noticing. Though not as scattered as it all was that first day back, nothing on the base is fully organized yet. There’s no set rotation of people on watch, no designated spots for anyone to be at any time. And there are still far too many new members present for there to be a way to keep track of everyone all the time anyways.

So yes, she thinks, no one would have paid attention or cared where she was this morning. She could have visited Ben, could have given him a pep talk — or gotten one from him, perhaps — but she’s also fairly certain all her resolve to be level-headed and reasonable in the meeting today would have disappeared if she’d come in fresh off of seeing him. 

And she needs a level head today. She needs to remember all of her arguments in favor of letting him stay, all of the words she’s prepared outside of “Please, please, please.” She has to think about facts and numbers and anecdotes — not about how her hand fits so perfectly in his, or the way even sitting in silence with him is comforting, or how every time she looks in his eyes she remembers the moment she thought he’d never open them again.

She resists the temptation to visit him, to make the most of what some cruel part of her brain imagines might be borrowed time, even though every cell in her body is begging her to go to him. Which is why, as she’s standing in a sea of trees, she’s utterly unsurprised to feel the Force bond snap into place. 

“I’m not sure how far away you are right now, but I can sense your unease from here,” Ben’s voice echoes in her head. 

And then, a second later, he’s there in front of her. As always, she can’t see any of his surroundings other than the bed he’s sitting up in. 

He looks considerably healthier than he did a day and a half ago — his hair is a mess but the bags under his eyes have shrunk and he’s not quite as deathly pale as he had been.

“I thought you might come by this morning,” he says, his mouth downturned in the faintest hint of a frown. 

“I thought I might too, but…” 

“You wanted a clear head.” 

Yet again, she wonders if he can actually read her mind. The thought would bring a smile to her face if there wasn’t a tangle of nerves clawing away at her insides right now. 

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, you know,” he says. 

Rey would roll her eyes at this — she _wants_ to — but his voice has gone so soft and his features have melted into something so vulnerable that she can’t bring herself to do anything but look directly at him and say “I want to,” as firmly as she can. 

“I wouldn’t blame you. If you’d rather not or if you just want an out. I promise I’d understand.” 

“Ben, stop it. I mean it. If I didn’t want you here you wouldn’t be here. I mean really, do you think I spent all that time trying to bring you back to life, and then convincing you to come here, just so I could ditch you at the first available opportunity?” 

She doesn’t mean to snap at him, she really doesn’t. But she also doesn’t understand how he can sense her every emotion, can practically read her mind, and yet he still can’t comprehend how much she cares about him. 

“Oh.” He looks away from her and his brow furrows as he works his mouth in an oddly familiar way. And then he looks back, and there’s something new in his eyes, some comprehension, some light. “You mean it.” 

“Yes,” she sighs, “I mean it.” 

The corner of his mouth tilts upward.

“Okay then,” he says. 

The connection is about to fade out again, she feels it slipping before it does. But she knows, when she can see him like this it means she can touch him too. So she does the same thing she always does with him. She takes a step forward. 

It doesn’t seem to take as much effort on his part as it did before for him to reach his arm out, but Rey still notes the slight trembling of his hand. 

She closes the rest of the distance between them with ease, but she stops herself right before they’re close enough to touch. 

_This_ was exactly why she didn’t visit him this morning. It would be too easy lower her mental defenses, to let herself go soft on a day she needs to stay firm. She told herself she didn’t want to be distracted… but maybe that was foolish. Maybe no matter what she does, there will be a small part of her that’s with him today. Maybe that’s how it should be. They _are_ stronger together, after all. 

“Just for a minute?” he asks. 

“Are you ever going to get tired of asking me to take your hand?” she smiles. 

“I guess the only way to find out is for me to keep asking,” he smiles back at her carefully. All of his smiles are still so careful.

She laces her fingers with his, she notices that Ben’s hand is warmer than it was the last time she touched it. A good sign.

She pretends _not_ to notice the sigh of relief he tries to hide when she strokes her thumb over his. 

* * *

Rey wasn’t around when Poe assumed the title of Acting General. She missed his first days in the role, so if there was a shaky transition, Rey never saw it. But she doubts that there ever was any difficulty with the transition at all. What’s far more likely, she thinks, is that he slid into the position seamlessly — or at least as seamlessly as anyone could in the middle of a galactic war. 

He stands in the same place Leia used to stand in the command center, looking every part the leader as he faces the recently gathered crowd.

Rey is seated next to Finn right up front in the rather large semi-circle that’s been formed. Pilots, mechanics, lower ranking officers, and dozens of other people whose jobs she couldn’t even guess are gathered for the meeting. 

It had been a small relief to realize that not literally every person on the base would be in attendance. Only those who are planning on staying to work as a part of the Resistance’s main operations — rather than those returning to their home planets as agents of the cause — are present.

“Think of it as branches of a tree,” Poe had explained before the meeting began. “We’re the roots and the trunk, standing firm. But it’s the branches and the leaves that can spread out across the galaxy the way we need.

There will be more meetings, a million more meetings, before all of those others depart. There will be strategies and plans, agreements, deals, and alliances to solidify. But this meeting only really impacts the people who are staying. Those who are either so displaced that they have nowhere else to go, or they have some vital skill that would be best served here. 

So it’s this group that Rey needs to convince. 

In her years of solitude on Jakku she never developed much of a skill for public speaking, and even after joining the Resistance her role has been more about action and less about talking. She’s done a good job, she thinks, at learning how to look after people other than herself… but defending them in a situation where a lightsaber will do no good? That’s entirely new. 

Rey forces herself to focus on the present, to absorb Poe’s words. 

He’s already gone over the agenda with her so she knows they’re not jumping straight into the “Kylo… Ben Issue” as Poe so uncomfortably referred to it a mere hour ago. 

For now, all she has to do is sit and listen. 

“— lost more than half their forces,” Poe says. Rey’s not sure what the start of that sentence was, but judging by the light applause scattered throughout the room, it must have been a good thing. 

“But,” he continues, “that doesn’t mean the work is over. Let’s go into a little more detail about our most recent intelligence.” 

Poe pulls up map after map, diagram after diagram on a holopad, talking through each one, explaining which planets are still occupied by the First Order, which are free, and which have been obliterated. The Sith Cultists may have been killed in Exegol, Poe explains, but they have reason to believe there are still loyalists scattered across different star systems and planets. 

“If there’s anything we’ve learned,” Poe says as he closes out of a map of Mustafar, “it’s that vigilance is key. You all know this already — the First Order rose out of the ashes of the Empire. It’s up to us to act quickly, decisively, and with a united front to assure that something even worse doesn’t rise from the ashes of the First Order.” 

Voices rise in assent, echoing through the crowd. Poe stands in front of them looking determined, confident, and every bit the leader he’s become. Even distracted as she is by the nerves roiling inside her, Rey can feel the swell of pride emanating from Finn. 

“Any questions before we move on to our next bit of business?” Poe asks once everyone’s finally settled down. 

“I have one,” calls a man from the back. 

“Go ahead,” Poe nods. 

For a moment, Rey’s relieved, thankful for the slight delay in the task she knows is at hand. But the relief lasts only for a moment, and no longer. 

“What about the First Order’s Supreme Leader? We thought he would’ve tried to attack by now.” 

A murmur of voices runs through the gathered crowd, the result of too many people talking amongst themselves. Rey can’t pick out any one conversation but the whispers of “supreme leader” and “Kylo Ren” and “monster” are unmistakeable. 

The words sound foreign to Rey’s ear. It’s been so long since she’s thought of Ben as any of those things. Every day it’s becoming harder and harder to remember how she used to see him, before. But of course that’s all he is to all of these people. That’s all he is to the entire galaxy. 

And right now, the burden falls entirely on Rey to change that. 

It’s time, then. 

“I’m glad you brought that up.” Poe shifts his gaze to her just for a second before returning to looking at the man who asked the question. “That actually has to do with our next issue up for discussion.” 

“Is he in hiding? Did you find him?” sounds a voice somewhere on Rey’s right. 

She’s not sure when it happened but she’s realized she no longer feels entirely connected to her body. Her heart is racing, pounding in her chest with an intensity she’s only ever felt before mid-duel. She’s still sitting, but she can’t feel the chair beneath her, and the room feels at least twice as hot as she knows it must be. 

A hand on her knee brings her back to herself. She looks up at Finn who gives her what almost looks like a smile — it’s meant to be reassuring at least — and squeezes ever so gently on her knee. 

“Well, he’s—“ Poe hesitates. “He’s not missing. And he’s—“ 

“He’s not going to attack,” Rey feels herself stand up before she even thinks to do it. “He’s absolutely not going to attack.” 

“How can you be so sure?” This time the question comes from someone she knows — Beaumont Kin. “If we know where he is we should strike before—“ 

“There’s nothing to strike. He’s here.” The words come unbidden out of her mouth. This is not how she intended any of this to go. “He’s here on the base and he’s not going to attack because he’s on our side now.” 

Rey is used to silence. She’s used to the still quiet of her dwelling on Jakku where the only sound at night was the distant howl of the wind as it snapped across the desert. She’s used to the way the world falls away and disappears when she’s deep in meditation, connected to the Force in mind, body, and soul. She’s encountered enough silence — in her hut on Ahch-To, in the Falcon rewiring a faulty breaker, in those few horrifying minutes on Exegol when she thought she truly was doomed to be alone — that she’s used to it. 

But nothing could have prepared her for the heavy hush that falls over the room when she finishes speaking. 

The tension is thick in the air, unrelenting in its silence. 

Her legs are moving on their own accord now. 

Poe steps to the side, allowing Rey to take his place as he slides closer to Rose. 

“What do you mean, he’s here?” a voice from the back shrieks. 

“So it’s true, then?” the first man who spoke asks. The accusation in his tone is clear. 

It hits Rey — and she’s shocked it didn’t occur to her sooner — that this isn’t just Ben’s reputation on the line… it’s her own. The uncomfortable pallor that’s fallen over the room isn’t just saturated with shock, like she had first assumed. It’s tinged with something else… betrayal. 

She’s brought one of the most notorious, most dangerous men in the galaxy into their midst and only bothered to explain why to a handful of people. In some of their eyes, that might make her just as dangerous. 

“He’s being held in a private room, under surveillance,” Poe offers. He doesn’t bother to mention that Ben couldn’t physically leave that room even if he wanted to. 

“He turned,” Rey says. She takes a deep centering breath, grasping at the steady sense of calm she has practiced reaching within herself to find so many times. “Before the final battle, before even I made it to Exegol he turned. He abandoned the First Order, he left the dark side behind, and he has no intention of ever returning to it.” 

“How can you be so sure of that?” someone asks. 

She’s told the story enough times — the whole ordeal with Palpatine, the moment she knew Ben was on his way, both of them dying and bringing each other back — that she doesn’t find herself tripping over her words or reaching for her next sentence. It’s smooth, detailed, and if she didn’t know herself, she’d think she was actually comfortable speaking in front of a crowd. 

“It could still be a trick, couldn’t it?” Commander D’Acy asks. 

“It couldn’t. I—“ she tries to think of how to put this without sounding like she’s making it up. She knows no one on the base fully understands the Force. 

Now is not the time to explain the dyad or the bond or the seeing him when he’s not really there — she knows, somehow, that all of that would confuse the issue. But she also knows that in all the time she’s been with the Resistance, she’s never given them a reason not to trust her. She’s never lied, never broken a promise. She’s proven herself at every opportunity and she’s certain she’ll prove herself a hundred more times before the galaxy is finally, fully at peace. 

“I see everything in his mind,” she settles for saying. “I feel everything he feels. We’re… connected. If he wanted to trick me, I’d know well before he did it. And if that ever happened — _and it won’t_ — of course I would alert everyone who needed to be alerted.” 

They’re not fully convinced; she doesn’t even need to use the Force to feel that. But she wan’t really expecting this to be easy, was she? She didn’t _really _think it would be a quick chat and then she’d be back in his room, lacing her fingers with his and telling him the good news.

She’s used to battles, but not ones of this nature. She’s more suited to solving disputes through a lightsaber, or a staff, or on rare occasions her fists. She’s not used to having to use her words, to seek diplomacy, to deal in politics at all. 

But right now, her words will have to be enough. 

“I’m not naive,” she says, bracing herself for who knows how long this meeting might go. “I know who he was and what he did, but he is not that person any more. I’d put my life on it. I have.” 

“I can vouch for him too,” Maz stands up — or perhaps she was already standing — and makes her way to the front of the crowd. “I’ve talked to him, looked in his eyes. I can see it. Leia spent her final moments reaching out to the light she knew was still in him. From what I can tell, she was right.” 

Rey throws a grateful smile Maz’s way before turning back to the rest of the crowd. 

“Everyone here came from somewhere else,” she says. “We all have pasts, some far less spotless than others. But we choose to trust each other, we’ve welcomed every person who wanted to fight and given them the chance to prove themselves. Ben has already fought for all of us, he wants to keep fighting as long you let him, and I’m just asking you to give him a chance to prove it.” 

“She’s right.” 

Rey wasn’t expecting to hear Finn’s voice at all during this meeting. She had assumed he would stay quiet, silently supporting her no matter which way it went. She thought at most, if it came down to a vote, he’d side with her. But she certainly didn’t think he would actually speak up on her — on _Ben’s _— behalf. 

“I was a Stormtrooper. My whole life, until one day I wasn’t and I defected and I joined all of you. Jannah, her whole crew… they all left the First Order. And they came here and we trusted them. Hell, even General Hux — who tried to kill me personally multiple times —spied for us and saved mine and Poe’s lives in the end. How many of us wouldn’t be here today without his intel? People can change, is what I’m saying.” 

The room is no less silent than it was minutes ago, but there’s been a shift. Rey can feel it just as surely as she can feel the ground beneath her. The mood in the room has changed, become more open, more accepting. The momentum has started — she just needs to give it a final push. 

“The Resistance has always been a place for hope, for second chances, for redemption. We don’t deal in absolutes like the Sith did. We don’t value brutality over mercy like the Empire and the First Order did. What sets us apart, what makes us _stronger_ is our ability to forgive and look for a brighter future. We’d be doing ourselves a disservice, we’d be letting our own mission down, if we turned away from that.” 

Her words, as it turns out, are enough. 

When it’s clear that Rey has run out of words — when Chewie and Maz and Finn have all nodded their agreement that Ben is not only not a threat, but an asset to the Resistance — Poe puts it up to a vote. 

And to Rey’s great shock and utter elation, almost everyone agrees to let Ben stay on the Base. 

“With restrictions, of course,” Poe reasons. He rattles off a list of places Ben won’t be allowed to freely roam and meetings he can’t sit in on, but Rey’s heart is beating too quickly and her eyes are filling up with too many tears for her to focus on anything but standing upright. 

She’ll ask Poe to go over all the details again later. She’ll need him to, since she still needs to relay it all to Ben. But for now it’s enough just to stand here and bask in the knowledge that this isn’t the end, that despite the universe’s seemingly constant attempts to pull them apart, she gets to stay by Ben’s side for the foreseeable future. 

Rey offers only one condition of her own: she insists that the two of them be put on the same missions. 

Poe agrees without any argument. 

“I’ll be curious to see your double-act in action,” is all he says in response. 

Unfortunately for Rey, the meeting isn’t quite over yet. She yields the floor back to Poe, makes her way to the empty seat next to Finn and sits down — an impressive feat of self-control if she does say so herself, considering the way her body is practically vibrating with anticipation of seeing Ben again and telling him what’s happened. 

Her stomach has finally finished unfurling all the knots it tied itself into this morning. Her head is already swimming with the possibilities of what the coming months might look like for her and Ben.

Her hand practically aches to hold his again.

* * *

A/N: btw I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/camhope329) yelling about reylo, star wars, and random nonsense basically 24/7


	9. Chapter 9

Poe ends the meeting with a promise to reconvene in two day’s time to go over upcoming assignments. Rey will, of course, be present for that one and — her heart beats even faster just thinking about it — it will be her job to relay necessary information to Ben.

Logically she knows that whatever the assignment is will be dangerous. She and Ben are the two strongest fighters on the base even after returning from the brink of death. Of course whatever mission they’re sent on will be hazardous, but the thought of getting to finally, _finally_, fight by his side, in the same place, at the same time, is enough to override any of the nerves she probably should be feeling.

Once everyone starts to disperse, Rey fights the urge to rush immediately to Ben’s room and instead forces herself to stay behind with her friends. She’s been running away from them, into battle, into Ben for so long, and they’ve just given her too generous gift for her to run away now. She owes them at least a proper thank you, an hour or so of uninterrupted time. Now that she knows she has time to spare.

The room clears quickly — most of those in attendance waste no time in loitering, eager as they most likely are to relay the non-confidential parts of the meeting to their other friends on the base. Surely confirmation of the rumor that the former Supreme Leader is among their midst will have circulated the whole planet by nightfall.

As soon as the last person leaves, Poe slumps down in a chair, looking like he’s aged before her very eyes.

Now it’s just Rey and the three people she’s spent the most time with over the past year. Finn is still by her side, Rose moves from her seat to the now vacant seat next to Finn. And Poe is facing them, hands in his head, eyes shut.

She’s not used to all of four of them being so quiet around each other. But perhaps this is what peace time (though she’s apprehensive to label it as such just yet) is — a quieting. An end to the restlessness of unfinished business. The luxury to take a deep breath and enjoy it.

So she accepts the moment for what is is, even though she knows it’s fleeting, even though she knows the work is nowhere near done. For just a few seconds she can sit, silent in a room with people she loves, and just _breathe._

Rey tries — she really tries — to relax. But the adrenaline that was coursing through her veins is quickly seeing itself out, leaving her feelings both drained and on edge — uncomfortable in the quiet but unwilling to shatter it.

It’s Rose who finally ends the moment for them all.

“How long was that meeting?” she yawns. “Feels like we’ve been in here for hours.”

“Poe might need to work on being a little more succinct. Maybe a few less run-on sentences,” Finn replies, the teasing edge to his voice clear.

Poe groans into his hands.

“I have huge, impossible shoes to fill, you know. I’m doing my best to sound leaderly.”

“And you’re doing a very good job.” Finn reaches to close the distance between himself and Poe and places a hand on his knee. “Seriously, you are.”

Silence falls over the group again. Is this what it’s going to be like, Rey wonders, when the last remaining threats have been eliminated? When they don’t have anything they have to talk about, will they even care to talk about anything any more?

The thought tightens something in her chest. It feels vaguely like panic and it takes her longer than a few seconds to identify the source. To identify the fear that maybe without a war to hold them all together, there will be nothing to hold them together at all.

She doesn’t notice the way her breathing has sped up until she realizes that Rose is staring at her. And so is Finn.

“You alright, Rey?” Rose asks.

“I am,” she nods as she struggles to catch her breath and to push away fears of loss and abandonment she thought she’d long since done away with. “I am, just… today’s been a lot. Thank you. Thank you all.”

“Thank yourself,” Poe finally lifts his head. “You did good up there today.”

“You did good,” Finn echoes.

She feels suddenly bashful; all of the fire that possessed her when she stood in front of the crowd has been extinguished by tears of relief she hasn’t shed yet but knows she will.

“I— I know this was a hard decision for you all and—“

“It wasn’t,” Rose cuts her off.

“What?”

“It wasn’t a hard decision. Not for me at least.”

“I’ll be honest,” Poe sighs. “I don’t like it. But not liking something doesn’t make it wrong. Any other outcome would have been an injustice and a betrayal to our own beliefs. I don’t wanna be friends with the guy, I don’t want to eat dinner with him or shake his hand or share inside jokes, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t earned a chance to prove himself. He deserves a place here just like anyone else. So no, it wasn’t a hard decision for me either.”

Yet another silence falls over the group, still uncomfortable to Rey in its unexpectedness. She really hadn’t prepared for this — she’s been so single-minded in her goal of keeping Ben here that she hasn’t considered, for days, what the aftermath of that decision would be. And she certainly hadn’t imagined any scenario in which they were just… like this.

But the crushing fear doesn’t return because there’s a quality to this silence that she still isn’t quite used to, but she can feel it coming off of her friends in waves — companionship.

They’re not quiet because they have nothing to say, they’re quiet because they don’t _need _to say anything.

So she sits, and ignores the way her leg is bouncing and the way her head is still spinning and simply enjoys being in the presence of her friends.

She’s not sure how much time passes but eventually Finn sighs.

“We’ve got your back. We always will,” he says.

He technically could be saying it to anyone in the room — and it would ring true for anyone in the room — but Rey knows the sentiment is meant for her.

She thought she’d used up all of her words earlier, but suddenly she finds there’s so much she still wants to say. She wants to tell them how much their trust means to her, to reassure them that she’d never ever do anything to endanger their lives, to destroy what they’ve built.

But there are no words that would properly convey the depth of her gratitude.

“I— thank you,” is what she settles for instead.

It seems to be enough.

* * *

His door is closed, as it always is, but the thrill of pushing it open and seeing him isn’t tainted with the fear of anyone noticing and asking what’s behind that door, anymore. Because they know. Because everyone on the base knows that Ben Solo is here and that Rey cares a great deal for his well-being, even if they don’t know exactly how deep that care goes.

So she pushes the door open confidently, without glancing behind her shoulder or squeezing through the smallest opening she can manage.

Rey knows it’s been less than a day since she last saw him, but there’s something different about seeing him in person rather than through the bond. He’s real, and solid, and propped all the way up in bed, the pen in his hand gliding across a sheet of paper.

She only gets a moment to observe him before he stops with whatever he’s writing and turns to look at her. The corners of his mouth tilt up, unsurprising given the amount of pure joy he must be feeling her give off.

But still, when he says, “Good news, then?” there’s a tinge of hesitancy to his words.

“Good news,” she nods, allowing herself to fully beam for the first time in days.

His smile reaches his eyes, crinkling their corners. That’s already enough to make her want to run to him immediately, but the slight glistening building up in those corners clinches it. She practically launches herself at him, grateful that he can anticipate her actions well enough to open his arms to her right in time.

She finds herself half on top of him as his arms wrap tightly around her back. She can feel him rest his head atop hers and she buries her face in the crook of his neck, allowing herself to marvel for a minute at how perfectly they seem to fit together. Like two pieces of a whole.

Silence, it seems, is the theme of the evening.

Rey stays pressed against him, crushed tightly to his chest, inhaling the faint smell of bacta he’s covered in. One of his hands remains firmly on her lower back, but the other traces up and down her spine in a motion so calming and so familiar it seems impossible to her that she survived so many years of her life without it.

And all at once the relief she’s feeling doubles and he holds onto her even tighter and she thinks she could stay here forever — and she actually _could_ now that she knows he doesn’t have to leave. And finally the tears that she forced down when she stood in front of the crowd are pricking at her eyes and some small part of her just wants to hold onto him and cry on his neck until she falls asleep.

“What are the terms?” he asks. She can feel the vibrations from his throat as he speaks. “They’re not bad, really.” She sniffs. She’s sure he can hear her and thus sees no need to move her head. “No sitting in on confidential meeting briefs, no free range of the base, quarters separate from everyone else, at least for a little while.”

“That’s all exceedingly fair.”

She nods against him. “Oh, and you’re going to be sent to fight in missions.”

“Well, I would have done that any way.”

Rey finally pulls back just enough to look at him, their noses practically touching.

“And I made them agree to send me on all the same missions.”

Ben quirks an eyebrow.

“Are they aware that’s a privilege, not a punishment?”

“They’re very excited to see us in action.”

“They are?” Ben huffs out what almost sounds like a laugh. 

“Poe is, at least.”

“Well,” Ben sighs, “last time we worked together I got thrown into a pit and and both of us briefly died, so we can only go up from there I suppose.”

“True,” she brushes her nose against his, “but we did sort of save the galaxy from certain doom.”

He closes the minuscule space between them, brushing his lips against hers ever so gently.

“Tell me every detail,” he mumbles against her mouth.

“What?” Rey pulls back enough to look at him as she strokes his cheekbone with her thumb.

“Tell me exactly how it all happened, what you said, what they said. I just— I need to be sure this is real, that this isn’t the only good dream I’ve ever had.”

She wants to dig deeper into that, but there will be plenty of time to ask questions later. Time to ask him what he was writing before she came in, time to ask him what he meant when he said he sleeps fitfully, time for all of it.

Suddenly time is stretching out — not in the barren, desolate, dreary way it did when she was waiting for an unknown future on the sands of Jakku. Instead it’s like time has opened to her, the way the galaxy opens when she’s in the cockpit of the Falcon, the way the forest of Ajan Kloss is densely populated with trees, each coming from a set origin but branching in a million different directions. Plenty of time for everything.

As much as she’d like to look directly into his eyes the whole time she tells him about the meeting, the chance for distraction is too high — she could very well abandon her train of thought in favor of staring at him instead, now that she’s allowed to. Now that she doesn’t have to worry that the next time she looks in his eyes will be the last time.

So she flips herself over onto her back and nuzzles into Ben’s side as he wordlesslywraps an arm around her, their movements so smooth it’s as if this is a choreographed dance they’ve been doing for years.

He doesn’t interrupt her much, as she talks. She eases into the story, starting all the way at the beginning with Poe’s brief, but she can feel him tense as she describes their initial reactions to hearing he’s on the base. A pang of guilt goes through Rey for not thinking to soften that part of it for him.

“No, no,” he mutters, his grip on her shoulder tightening slightly. “It’s fine, it’s… good. It’s good to know how far I’ve got to go.”

“Not nearly as far as you’ve already come.”

She knows even before she turns her head that he’s not going to be looking at her, but will have his eyes fixed on some invisible point on the wall across from them.

And she’s correct. He’s staring straight ahead, his lips pressed into a tight line that tilts downward at the corners. She can’t tell if his eyes are watery or if it’s simply a trick of the fluorescents. She gently nudges his side all the same.

“Hey, Ben.”

He doesn’t move. If it weren’t for the circles he’s started to trace on her shoulder, she’d think he was paralyzed.

“Ben—“

“What if it’s never enough?” He keeps staring at the wall, a small waver in his voice the only thing that betrays his stoic expression. “What if there’s just too much damage done and they never want me here?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, they’ve already agreed that you can stay.”

“But what if they never _want_ me?”

She can see it so clearly, the lonely child who became a troubled teen who became a broken man, tethered to a cause and a master that only cared about his power and never _him_.

And she knows, yet again, part of what drew her to him even when they were on opposite sides of the war. That shared fear — that she must have sensed even before she knew she sensed it — that perhaps there’s no length you can go to to make yourself wanted.

But that fear is a lie, she knows that now. Because Ben’s family wanted him and everyone on this base wanted her and she’s sure that they’ll come to want Ben. And even if they never do, she wants him and she knows that he wants her, and maybe they’ve never really been as alone as they once thought they were.

“I guess there’s not much use in worrying about that just yet,” she finally sighs. “But if they get to know the same Ben I know then I can’t imagine it ever being something to worry about.”

She can feel him relax just a little bit, but she’s hesitant to take that as a sign that she can keep going until she looks back up at him and sees that he’s finally torn his eyes away from the wall. She squeezes the thigh that’s pressed against her own — or rather, she tries to; his muscles are still so taut it’s more like squeezing a rock than a leg.

“Okay,” she settles for a pat instead, “breathe. We’re getting to the good part.”

He finally, finally relaxes all the way and pulls her even closer into his side.

She doesn’t mince words — she details every concern and every question that was directed at her. She can tell he’s trying not to react too visibly to anything she says, but she can also sense how difficult that is for him.

She does gloss over some of the details of her speech, though that’s only because she can barely even remember exactly what she said. She goes over it all in as much detail as she can though — not just because he asked but because it’s actually kind of fun to tell, now that she knows the outcome. Without the haze of fear and desperation, the meeting is somewhat of a good memory.

“It was Maz first,” she can hear herself on the verge of rambling but it doesn’t seem like Ben has any plans to her. “Maz vouched for you and that was huge and honestly I thought that might have been enough, but then Finn stood up, which I didn’t expect at all, but he made some good points—“

“I hope you thanked him for me,” Ben tilts his head down and presses his lips to her shoulder.

“I think some day the two of you might get along. He brought up how it’s possible for anyone to turn just like he did, and Jannah, and, um, Hux was a spy, and—“

“Wait, Hux? General Hux?” If she couldn’t feel the shock coming off of him she’d think he was angry with how sharply he’d spoken.

“I’m pretty sure. I never met him, but he gave Finn and Poe a lot of trouble last year.”

“General Armitage Hux?”

“Did you know him?”

Rey isn’t sure what response she was expecting but the sharp bark of laughter that bursts out of Ben’s mouth certainly wasn’t it. She recovers from the surprise of hearing him laugh just in time to appreciate the fact that she’s hearing him laugh out loud for the first time.

“Yeah, yes, I knew him,” he replies. “I was told the spy had been killed. No one told me it was Hux. He turned?”

“I’m not sure you could actually call it turning. Finn said his actual words were that he ‘needed you to lose.’”

“Wow,” Ben grimaces, “he must have hated me even more than I knew.”

Rey studies Ben for a moment as he stares at nothing, frowning, almost certainly about to get lost in his own head again. She cranes her head up and places a kiss on his cheek and it shouldn’t surprise her at this point how natural that feels, but it does all the same.

“If it makes you feel any better, it sounds like he hated everybody. Not an ideal way to live, I don’t think.”

Ben just hums and looks back down at her.

“What happened next?”

Rey gets through the rest of her retelling of the meeting without interruption. He just sits, and listens, and watches her. She doesn’t realize they’re breathing in tandem until she’s finally stopped talking. She doesn’t know if he’s timing his breaths with hers or if that’s just something the two of them are doing naturally.

“So that brings us back to what I’d said before, about restrictions,” she sighs.

Ben doesn’t say anything. He just nods once, his eyes boring into hers.

“I can’t tell exactly what you’re feeling right now,” Rey continues when it’s clear he’s not going to say anything yet. “But I hope you’re happy about this. I think it’ll work, and we knew this would be hard, but—“

“Rey.” It comes out even deeper than his voice usually is. “I’m extremely happy about this. I just— I wish I could have told them myself. I want them to know how serious I am about all of this.”

“They’ll know.”

“I want to make sure you know, too.”

“I know, Ben.”

He looks at her for another long moment then inhales deeply — the first time their breathing isn’t in sync for she doesn’t even know how many minutes.

She doesn’t have anything else to say. He doesn’t seem to either. So they sit there, on the slightly-too-small bed, sides pressed against each other, her head on his shoulder, his hand covering hers.

_Comfortable silence._

Rey thinks she might finally be starting to understand what that means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a crazy month for me, but I promise I'm going to get more consistent with updates on this!


	10. Chapter 10

Luke and Leia, as it turns out, might not have been the greatest teachers. 

Well that’s not exactly fair, Rey thinks to herself, as she and Finn stand in the middle of a clearing staring at each other. They had taken it upon themselves to train her, not to prepare her to train other people. And Leia hadn’t had to do the heavy lifting in the first place — there’d been enough of a foundation, just from Rey’s few days with Luke that Leia hadn’t had to explain how the Force works. And Luke, well, Luke had been going through quite a lot when she met him.

And even still, he’d been helpful in his own way. But Rey doesn’t really think a lecture about the failures of the Jedi, or the respect a lightsaber deserves will really help Finn in any practical way.

So while she’d definitely learned a great deal from them personally, they did not impart any wisdom regarding how to do that for someone else. Which has led to an irritating scenario she never could have foreseen.

Finn has just been standing here, waiting for her to do something, for at least five minutes. And she’s just been standing here, waiting to think of something to do for just as long.

“Is this… part of it?” Finn finally asks after several excruciating minutes of them doing absolutely nothing.

“Uh, no.” An idea strikes her. “Actually, maybe.”

“Okaaaaay.”

“Just— close your eyes.”

He does as he’s told after casting her one final glance that’s equal parts hopeful and suspicious.

“Alright,” she takes a breath. “What do you feel?”

“Besides silly?”

“Finn. Concentrate.”

“Okay, okay.” He scrunches his eyes even tighter. Frustration rolls off of him as he balls his hands up at his sides.

“No, no,” Rey interjects. “Not like that.”

“You’re not giving me much to go off here,” he opens one eye to look at her.

“Sorry. It was easier being on your side of things.”

Rey allows herself a moment of frustration, but only a moment. She takes a deep breath and thinks of a new way to start.

“Sit down, maybe,” she says. “There’s no real reason for us to be standing right now.”

Finn opens his other eye and sits down carefully on the ground. She sits across from him. They mirrored each other’s posture instinctively, Rey notes with a hint of amusement — legs crossed, back just a little slouched, hands on knees.

They’re back to staring at each other, but Rey can feel an actual plan forming now.

“Luke made me close my eyes,” she says, “for my first lesson. But I don’t really know if that was necessary. We can just sit here like this. It should have the same effect.”

Finn nods once, clearly still a little lost but willing to go along with it.

“You have to have felt it before,” Rey leans forward a little bit.

“Felt it?”

“The Force. You wouldn’t know you were Force-sensitive unless you’d felt it before.”

“That makes sense,” Finn says.

“What did it feel like? The times you felt it?”

He takes a deep breath, opens his mouth to speak, closes it, then opens it again.

“It felt like… connection.” He says it like he’s testing the words for their truth as he speaks.

Rey nods in what she hopes in an encouraging manner.

“Connection. Good. To what?”

“Uh, everything. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I do,” she smiles. “See if you can feel it again. It’s like a hum. Or a vibration, maybe.”

Finn shuts his eyes again.

“You don’t have to,” Rey says. “You can if you want, or you can look at me, or the trees, the grass, whatever you want.”

Finn looks around for a moment, before settling on some spot a bit to the right of her head.

It’s odd, being on this side of instruction, she thinks. It’s odd getting to share knowledge and watch someone understand it for the first time.

“The Force exists in all things, and it’s in the space between all things, and it _is _the space between all things. It’s always there for you to draw upon, it’s a wellspring of life and strength and power.”

She can feel the energy shift between them for one startling, sparkling moment.

“You feel it?” she prompts.

Finn nods. “You have this all the time?”

“I don’t _have_ it. We don’t— the Force doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s an entity unto itself. It exists whether you can feel it or not. And it will always exist. But to have access to it… to be able to use it… that’s—“

“A gift,” Finn finishes for her.

“Right.” She smiles.

Rey had been worried this morning that their first lesson wouldn’t be exciting enough. She anticipated a certain amount of disappointment when she told him they wouldn’t be doing anything more active than making a few fallen branches float — and even that’s a lofty goal. So it’s a pleasant surprise when she breaks the news and Finn’s face lights up.

They stay seated on the forest floor, the canopy of leaves high above their heads providing ample protection from the sun, which has taken its place at the very center of the sky.

Finn, once again, clenches his eyes shut.

“Sorry,” he says, cracking an eye open when she lets out a frustrated sigh.

“No, it’s fine. You can keep them closed. Just try to relax.”

“But I have to put out some amount of effort, don’t I?”

“Yeah, but you won’t do it if you’re tense. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but just take another deep breath and see if you can tap back into the Force again.”

She can sense when it clicks for him again. She can feel the exact moment she stops being the only one attuned to the energy vibrating between and around them. And she can see the exact moment Finn realizes he’s done it. And she wonders if perhaps, the real gift of the Force is not being able to use it, but being able to share it with someone else.

Rey is so focused on Finn, she doesn’t notice the bond has snapped into place until Ben appears right in her line of view.

In the brief second it takes her to recover from the surprise, Ben’s already turned away, as if to give her and Finn privacy.

“Oh, sorry,” Ben says. He keeps his eyes on the ground and his head facing away from her. “I’ll talk to you later.”

_Okay_, Rey sends through the bond. She’s certain Finn can’t hear Ben, but she’s not sure if Finn would hear it if she spoke out loud.

“Stop by when you can?”

_Of course._

He disappears — a sure sign that they’re both getting better at controlling the bond — but she can still feel the thrum of their connection buzzing within her.

Rey turns her attention back on Finn, who finally seems to have fully relaxed.

“Right,” she says quietly, making an effort not to startle him. “Do you feel that?”

Finn nods.

“I want you to reach out with your feelings. Now that you can sense the Force, try to actively connect to it. Can you picture our surroundings?”

He furrows his brow. Nods.

“Pick something small — even just a leaf next to you. Try to move it.”

Nothing happens. She watches him for what feels like minutes and still nothing happens. Rey starts to think she’s made a mistake somewhere in this. That wouldn’t be so hard to believe, considering she’s basically making this up as she goes along. Maybe she didn’t explain something clearly enough, or maybe she started from the wrong place, or maybe this just isn’t something she has enough knowledge of to even pass on to anyone else.

She briefly considers reopening the bond. Ben had far more formal training than she did — surely he’d know better where to start when teaching someone. But he’d seemed so uncomfortable with even accidentally intruding on them. Still, she can’t help but think if he knew she_ really_ needed him, he’d put aside whatever his discomfort was to help her…

Nothing happens for another second.

And then something does.

It’s just a twitch at first. The leaf shudders as if nudged by a light wind. It goes still again for a moment until it rustles again, with more force behind it this time, until it fully flips over.

She holds her breath.

The leaf starts to flip again, but instead of landing flat on the ground as it did before… it lifts. It couldn’t be more than an inch or two above the ground, but it _is_ above the ground, and that’s what matters. She watches in awe as the little leaf hovers above the forest floor, a tiny shred of green elevated above the rest, shaking as though it might crash back down at any moment.

“Am I doing it? I feel like I’m doing it,” Finn says, his eyes still closed.

“Yes you are.” Rey smiles.

Finn’s eyes shoot open, widening in a mix of surprise and jubilance as they fix on the leaf still floating between them.

“I’m doing it!” he exclaims.

“Keep focusing!”

“I’m focusing! I’m doing it!”

A swell of pride rises up in her not just for her own teaching skills, but for her friend’s achievement. It makes her want to laugh. So she does.

Within seconds they’re both cheering so loudly, Rey’s certain the rest of the base can hear them. But it’s already late morning, they shouldn’t be disturbing anyone. And besides, she’s pretty sure they’ve both earned the right to a little celebration.

Finn loses his focus and the leaf drops back to the ground unceremoniously, but that’s okay — he can try again as many times as they want.

There’s no meetings today, so neither of them are expected back any time soon, both having carved out the entire morning for training. Rey can’t remember a time — if there ever was one in the past year — where she and Finn have had nothing to do but actually just enjoy being friends.

They stay on the ground, soaking up the filtered rays of sun that shine through the trees. A slight breeze keeps the sun from becoming too punishing in its warmth. It’s comfortable being out here, and they’ve kept the topics of conversation comfortable as well. They’ve discussed just about everyone on the base, speculated on how many people are going to stick around, come up with a list of planets they should check out when they have the time, and taken turns doing some of the worst impressions of C-3PO she’s ever heard.

So when the conversation finally lulls, she really has nothing left to ask, other than the thing she’s been meaning to ask for days.

“So why did you wait so long to tell me?” She rests her head on her knees and turns to look at him.

“You had a lot going on,” Finn shrugs. “We all did.”

“I still would have wanted to know.”

“I know. But I also wanted to be sure before I said anything. And hey, you waited even longer to tell any of us you were telepathically communicating with Ky— Ben.”

Coming from someone else, she might think it was accusatory. But there’s no judgment in his tone, just a hint of curiosity.

“I had thought it was just a temporary thing. I didn’t want to alarm anyone if there was no reason.”

“Fair enough. But you know you could have told me, right?”

“Of course,” she smiles. And she means it. Maybe he wouldn’t have understood — even as things stand right now she’s sure he doesn’t fully understand — but he would have been supportive. If she didn’t know that before, she certainly knows it now.

She blinks back the tears that seem to prick at her eyes every time she so much as contemplates concepts like friendship and trust and belonging.

“While we’re on the subject of things we could have told each other,” Rey clears her throat, “you and Poe?”

“Ah, yes. Well, I wanted to be sure about that too.”

“And you are? Sure?”

Rey’s not sure she’s ever seen Finn smile as widely, as freely, as he is now.

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

* * *

Rey thinks she’s starting to learn how to be okay with not spending every minute worrying about Ben. It seems like every hour there’s less to worry about — he’s clearly healing, no one has made an attempt on his life, and if his confinement is making him restless, he hasn’t let on to her.

Rey’s plan had been to go straight to him once she was done training Finn for the day. Despite Ben’s refusal to stick around for any of the training, the bond hasn’t shut itself off since it clicked into place. It had been easy for her to send a quick message through it and let him know she was on her way. But then Finn had asked her to stick around for lunch and before she even had time to hesitate in any meaningful way, Ben’s voice was echoing in her head.

_Take your time and enjoy your friends. I’m not going anywhere, _he’d said. She could almost hear the soft smile in his voice.

And so that’s what she’s doing now.

Rey sits wedged between Finn and Rose, with Poe and Jannah flanking them on either side as they enjoy a relatively uneventful meal tucked away in a corner, as far as they can get from prying eyes.

Since becoming Acting General, Poe has explained more than once, alone time has become a foreign concept to him. All hours of the day people are coming up to him to ask questions, offer unsolicited suggestions, and largely ignore any request for privacy he makes.

So the group stays as secluded as possible, giving Poe a few brief moments of peace before he goes back to being in charge.

Another thing she’s starting to learn is how nice it is to sit in her friends’ presence, even if no one has anything particularly important to say.

Lunch comes to its natural conclusion and it almost startles Rey when she realizes she’s been sitting and leisurely eating for the past half hour.

It still surprises her sometimes, that she has the luxury of eating and enjoying her food without worrying about where the next meal is coming from. She scrapes the last dregs of her meal out of the bowl and worries, not for the first time, that all of this has just been some elaborate fever dream brought on by the relentless desert heat of Jakku. For a second, she pictures herself waking up in the sand, a year younger but a lifetime wiser and wonders how she would manage to pull herself up and scratch another line in the wall, knowing how much more of the galaxy there really is.

_You know I’m going to ask you about whatever this is when I see you, right?_

Rey’s very thankful her bowl is empty because she startles nearly out of her seat when Ben’s voice echos in her ear. She’d gotten so lost in her own thoughts, she’d completely forgotten the bond was still semi-open.

_It’s nothing_. She thinks back at him.

_Didn’t look like nothing_.

The bond closes, or narrows at least, and Rey turns her attention back to her friends. Rose and Poe, as it turns out, are deep in debate over which damaged ships should be repaired and which should be scrapped for parts.

It takes them all of five seconds to pull Rey into the debate, and she goes gratefully.

* * *

One of the few security droids the base has is positioned in front of Ben’s door when Rey finally makes it there. It’s a new — but unsurprising — addition that lets her pass without issue. Most likely Poe already instructed the droid to give Rey full access to the room, and it’s a gesture that does not go unnoticed by her.

He’s sitting up and already looking expectantly towards the door when she enters and the look in his eyes when he sees her is distracting enough to keep her from noticing the one very large change to the room for at least a minute.

And then her brain catches up to her eyes.

She can see both of his legs.

“You’re—“

“All better,” he smiles. “Or at least a lot better.”

“Is that what you were going to tell me earlier?”

Ben nods.

“A med droid came and unhooked me from everything. I wanted to come show you, but I was pretty sure that would’ve broken a rule.”

“Well, you’re showing me now.”

“Yeah,” a goofy grin breaks out on his face, “I am.”

Even though it’s only been a handful of days, she’s gotten so used to walking to him that it startles her when he pulls himself out of bed and walks — albeit shakily — to meet her in the middle of the room.

It’s not like she forgot, exactly, just how tall he is, but there is a stark difference between sitting on a bed next to him and feeling him tower over her as he gently rests his chin on her head the same way he did last night.

It should be suffocating, the way she’s crushed to his chest, practically inhaling the fabric of his shirt. It _should_ feel suffocating, but instead it just feels warm.

His hands circle around her, palms pressed flat against her back, and she twines her arms around him, her hands not even coming close to reaching each other across the broad expanse of his back.

It’s odd to realize you missed something well before you ever had it, but as they stand in the middle of the room, on equal footing, in no immediate danger and with no divide between them, she understands so clearly that she’s been missing this her whole life.

“How did training Finn go?” he asks, making no effort to move.

“We got there eventually. It was harder than I thought it would be. We can sit down, if you want,” she adds when she feels him sway ever so slightly.

“I do not want,” he sighs. “These past few days have been the least mobile I’ve ever been in my life. You have no idea how good it feels just to stand.”

“Well, what if I want to sit?” She pulls back just enough to look up at him.

He curls his shoulders down enough to kiss the tip of her nose.

“Then we’ll sit.”

He might not necessarily want to sit down, but it does turn out to be the best option — pacing the room seems like a waste of energy and Ben immediately shoots down Rey’s suggestion of a walk around the base. Though it would be allowed as long as she’s with him, he says it’s more than he’s prepared for. Rey doesn’t ask if he means physically or mentally.

Still, perching on the side of the bed, both of them leaning against each other not because they need the support but because it feels nice, is a good option.

He holds one of her hands in both of his as she tells him all about her and Finn’s training session, one of his thumbs brushing back and forth across the top of her hand.

“Why didn’t you stay?” she asks, her curiosity at his odd reaction that morning getting the better of her. “I wouldn’t have minded.”

“I know,” he says, “But Finn probably would have if he’d known I was there.”

She can’t argue with that. But she also knows that neither he nor Finn or anyone else on the base can or should avoid each other forever.

“Well, I might talk to him — eventually, not soon — and see how he feels about it. I could probably use your help. You have far more experience in Force training than I do,” she finishes.

“I’m not sure I’d be of much use,” he says.

“I seem to recall you being much more confident in your skills when you offered to be my teacher.”

Ben blushes, actually blushes, at that.

“I was confident in a lot of things I shouldn’t have been when I did that,” he replies. Then the light behind his eyes disappears and he averts his gaze from her for the first time since they sat down. He stares at their joined hands, as if they’re the most interesting thing in the world. “The last six years of my training were… nothing I’d want to pass on to anyone else.”

There’s a very thin line — and Rey realizes she’s still trying to find it — between mentions of the past that he takes in stride and ones that seem to crumble him from the inside.

She’s not sure exactly when it happened, but they seem to have crossed from one side of that line to the other. The shift in his mood offers a stark contrast to the lighthearted chatting they had just been enjoying.

“Hey, Ben?”

She squeezes his hand. It does nothing to lift him from the melancholy depths she can sense him spiraling into.

“Ben,” she tries again. 

It’s hard to tell if it’s the strength of their bond or the strength of his emotions — or perhaps a blend of both — but she feels as though a heavy blanket has fallen over the both of them, suffocating her the way being crushed to his chest a mere few minutes ago should have.

Talking to him right now is useless — she knows that instinctually. He’ll have to ride this — whatever it is — out, but he _will_ come out from under it soon. She knows that instinctually too.

And they’re in no rush, so she just keeps sitting next to him. Her free hand finds its way to his back, his shoulders, the nape of his neck.

He maintains a tight grip on her hand, tight enough that his hands seem to be the only part of him not trembling.

Rey’s hand moves up again to settle in his hair. She runs her fingers through it, stroking in what she hopes is a soothing manner.

Her arm starts to ache — even sitting there’s enough of a height difference that she has to reach a bit — but she doesn’t dare stop. Not now that he seems to be finally calming down. Not as his breathing starts to even back out. Not as he takes one more shaky breath and finally lifts his head to look at her.

“Better?” she asks.

He nods, looking a decade younger than she knows he is.

“Good.” She runs her hand through his hair one more time, brushing a few errant strands away from his face. She moves her hand to his cheek and wonders if she’s ever going to stop marveling at the fact that he is warm, and alive, and here with her.

He loosens his grip on her hands though he makes no sign of letting go.

“I’m sorry,” he forces out, his voice much softer than it usually is.

“What are you—“

“This shouldn’t keep happening, I shouldn’t have— You should be able to speak freely without throwing me into a breakdown.”

“Hmm,” Rey sighs. She moves her arm back to circle around him and pushes herself closer to his side before pressing a kiss to the shoulder nearest her. “That’s true. But I’m sure we’ll get there.”

A little bit of the tension in his body seems to leave at that.

“Really,” she continues, “you don’t need to apologize for having feelings. Some of the things you’ve been through… well, they warrant feelings.”

Ben just hums noncommittally at that. There’s still something of a far away look in his eyes.

Rey takes a deep breath, acting on a new idea before she has the chance to think herself out of it.

“Remember what you saw me thinking about earlier?”

That seems to get his full attention. He snaps his head to look at her again.

“Do you… want to talk about it?” He says the words like he’s testing them out, like it’s a foreign phrase he hasn’t yet mastered.

Rey realizes that that’s probably the case.

“Not really,” she says. “But I’m going to. Because I think it might make sense to you.”

A slight nod of his head is the only indication he gives that he’s ready for her to continue.

“I was thinking about how none of this feels real.” Ben’s eyes finally focus all the way on her at her words. “Like it’s too good to be true, and I’m going to wake up and discover that I’m still on Jakku, slowly dying in the desert. Except it’ll be worse than before, because I’ll know about how much more of a life I could have, but I won’t get to actually have any of it.”

That’s all she manages to get out before she can feel herself, getting choked up, but it seems to be enough.

“I’m still not used to the quiet,” Ben says, speaking so quietly himself that Rey would have to strain to hear him if they weren’t pressed so close together.

“The quiet?” she prompts.

“Is it always like this for everyone else? Quiet and not confused?”

“Sometimes I’m confused.”

“No, I mean—“ he shakes his head, clearly trying to gather his thoughts. “It’s just me now. In my mind. There’s no one talking to me but me. And every time I think about that for too long, I expect to hear him again.”

“Snoke?”

“Snoke, Palpatine… I guess it was all him wasn’t it? I just— I keep thinking he’s going to show up in my head again, that this isn’t as over as I think it is. And I hate that, because I like the quiet. I _want_ to enjoy it. But it makes me nervous.”

This is not something that’s going to be fixed overnight. Rey thinks it’s unlikely to be something she can fix for him at all. But she knows with that same stunning clarity she feels every time she thinks about Ben, that she’ll be by his side for as long as it takes him to work through it, and then for a long time after that.

But somehow that seems more like a declaration centered on herself than it is on him, so she stores that thought away for a different time.

For now, she thinks, just holding him might be enough.

She’s sure he can tell what she’s trying to do, when she pushes herself backwards until she’s propped up by the headboard and pillows on the bed. But he doesn’t move until she opens her arms.

Rey thinks absently that it must look silly, her cradling a man as giant as Ben, but when he buries his face in the space where her neck and her shoulder meet and slings an arm all the way across her waist, she can’t bring herself to care what she looks like.

“So you like the quiet?” she asks when she feels him go practically limp against her.

“It’s strange. But peaceful. And this is what it’s always been like for you and for everyone else?”

“It is,” Rey nods even though she knows he can’t see her. “All I ever hear is myself. And you.”

She’s not sure how long they stay like that, just enjoying each others’ presence and the quiet and the gentle pulse of energy in the bond between them. Eventually her hands find their way back to his hair, and she takes a moment to reflect on how unfairly soft it is.

For a second, she thinks he’s fallen asleep, but then he shifts slightly, tightening his grip on her waist in the process.

“How did you know to do that, earlier?” He’s so relaxed he almost sounds lazy.

“I didn’t,” Rey murmurs, as unwilling to break the gentle peace of the room as he seems to be. “But when I was little, whenever I was upset, I always wished there was someone who could stroke my head and tell me it’d be okay. So I thought maybe that would work for you too.”

“That’s… incredibly sad, Rey.” He presses his lips to her collarbone.

“Yes, but I’m happy to be here doing it for you.”

He shifts again, this time to tilt his head up enough so that their lips can meet as he pulls her even closer to him, his hand clutching at her back.

Her hands don’t leave his hair for quite some time.


	11. Chapter 11

Rey should be used to briefings — she’s sat through enough of them in the past year — but there’s still a nervous energy that thrums through her as everyone gathers to meet for what will be their last briefing before their next mission.

It’s all a far cry from the “grab a staff and beat the hell out of anyone who attacks you” approach Rey grew up with. She understands intellectually the importance of strategy and war theory and all the other things half the people in this room grew up learning, but a large part of her wants them to stop talking so much and just _go_.

“It’s a good thing” Ben had said last night, nuzzling her neck, when she was already complaining about the many hours she’d be spending listening to Poe in the morning. “Just think, the sooner the briefing, the sooner the mission. And each mission down just gets us a little closer to it being over forever.”

She’d left him for her own sleeping quarters shortly after that, trying not to feel stung by the fact that he still hasn’t so much as expressed interest in sleeping in the same bed as her. She can feel how much it pains him to watch her leave at night, so she knows he must be able to tell how much it’s bothering her too. And yet, he hasn’t even brought it up since turning her down that first night.

He’d said he sleeps “fitfully” as if that was a full reason. Well so does she. And she can’t help but wonder if they’d both have more peaceful nights if they were spending them curled into each other.

Before she’s able to delve too deep into wonderings of what else they might be able to do in the same bed, Poe takes his place in front of the crowd and pulls up a holomap of a small planet Rey doesn’t recognize.

It’s all very simple — several members of the First Order retreated to Akiva, another planet in the Outer Rim. They’re estimated to have a few ships, a few weapons, and dwindling supplies. The plan is to arrive at the planet, take down the ships and defenses before anyone knows they’re there, and hopefully get the First Order members to surrender.

“But of course, we have to be prepared for the very real possibility that they won’t,” Poe sighs. “Most likely, we’re looking at a fight. And while we have the numbers on our side for once, we can’t discount the power of advanced weaponry.”

“And a lack of morals,” Rose mutters next to Rey.

Poe shoots Rose a look that’s clearly intended as a warning, but really just looks like he’s trying not to laugh.

“Let’s just focus on the weaponry for now,” he says.

And they do focus on the weaponry. For much longer than Rey would have thought possible, let alone necessary.

Finn takes the floor for a while, outlining the different blasters and shields and missiles they’re likely to encounter, as well as the general layout of most First Order ships.

She tries to focus, she really does — but despite her best efforts, Rey feels herself zoning out a little. She’s sure she’d be more at attention if she didn’t already have a general idea of what her role in this whole ordeal will be, which is, of course, to beat the hell out of anyone who attacks her — just with a lightsaber now instead of a staff.

Rey tunes back in when Poe starts giving out assignments. Ground forces will come in after a much smaller group goes ahead to get the lay of the land. Poe had mentioned this part of the plan at lunch yesterday, and Rey’s already prepared to be listed in the group that will be going out first. So it comes as a surprise when Poe lists off Jannah, Rose, and himself, but says Finn, Rey, and Ben are going to stay behind. But a mission briefing is not the time to question Poe — especially not when she can tell he’s still working so hard to live up to Leia’s legacy and establish his own at the same time.

The rest of the plan does unfold the way Rey expects — they’ll attempt to take out the First Order’s satellite, free any potential prisoners, recruit the planet’s locals to their side, and — if they must — fight anyone who fights them.

It all should be simple enough. Somehow she doubts it will be.

The meeting ends without fanfare, just Poe reminding everyone to get a good night’s rest and be ready to head out early in the morning.

Rey, as is becoming tradition, hangs back with her friends until the room has cleared. And Poe, as is also becoming tradition, waits until the room has cleared to lean against a wall and run a hand through his hair.

“I think that was my best briefing yet, yeah?” he says.

“I don’t know,” Finn goes to lean next to him, “I was kinda hoping for more of an inspirational speech at the end.”

“Please,” Poe huffs, “we’ve all heard and delivered enough of those to last a lifetime.”

“Well I haven’t gotten to do one yet,” Rose chimes in.

“I heard you were very inspiring on Cra—“

“Crait, yeah but only Finn got the benefit of actually hearing it.”

“Tell you what. Next time it seems like everyone could use some rousing oration, I’ll yield the floor to you.”

“I’m holding you to that,” Rose beams.

“By they way, Rey,” Poe turns his attention to her. “I saw your face during the briefing so let me explain — the First Order most likely assumes, uh… Ben, is dead. So we can’t really have the two of you going ahead of everybody or they’ll know something’s up. Pretty much our only opportunity to use him for the element of surprise.”

“Oh. That actually makes a lot of sense,” Rey sighs. “Is my face actually that easy to read?”

“No, I’m just finally becoming Rey-literate.”

After a few more minutes and a promise to Finn to squeeze in some more training later in the day, Rey excuses herself, happy to not have to keep up any pretenses about where she’s going. They all know she’s on her way to visit Ben. And they, thankfully, have nothing negative to say about it.

* * *

Ben’s pacing when she opens the door. Head down, seven large strides to one wall, seven back to the first wall. She stands by the doorway, silently watching for half a minute. 

“Glad to see your energy’s up,” she says when he reaches the wall on the left side of the room for the third time since she arrived.

His head jerks up at that and he pauses, mid-step.

“This is the first morning I’ve woken up feeling genuinely good,” he grins a little sheepishly.

As soon as Rey steps fully into the room, Ben raises a hand and the door behind her gently shuts itself.

He’s standing inches away from her within seconds, and pulling her into his arms in less than a second after that.

“It seems you’ve recovered just in time,” Rey says, her voice muffled by his shirt. “We’re heading to Akiva early tomorrow morning.”

“And they’re still okay with me being there?”

Rey doesn’t need to look at him to know exactly which shade of concerned expression is crossing his features. She squeezes him a little tighter.

“Yes, they are.”

There’s no real need to start talking right away, so Rey just lets herself relish in the feeling of being held, opening her side of the bond at practically the same moment he opens his. Although, truth be told, she’s not sure if it ever _fully_ closes anymore.

That, she supposes, will serve them well tomorrow, when they might not have time to communicate verbally.

It’s an odd sensation to feel Ben feel the shift in her thoughts, but she thinks she’s slowly becoming used to it.

Ben finally lets go of her and guides her to sit, though it does not escape her notice that he opts to keep standing.

“Walk me through the plan for tomorrow?” he asks.

She does.

And as she does, he starts pacing again.

“You know,” Rey cuts herself off right after listing off the group that will be under Finn’s command, “if you’re feeling restless we can just go for a walk.”

“No, I’m fine,” Ben says. He stops pacing and, to his credit, it would be a good performance of “fine” if he didn’t immediately start bouncing on his heels.

“Mhm, okay. Anyways, we’ll be with Finn, Chewie, and a few others in the Falcon,” he seems to focus quite a bit more at that.

“We’ll be in the Falcon?” he asks.

Rey nods, struggling for once to interpret the look on his face.

He huffs. And then the pacing begins again.

“I had initially thought they’d send us out first, since we might be able to sense an oncoming attack the fastest, but—“

“The First Order probably thinks I’m dead. We only have one chance at using the element of surprise.”

“Were you— were you listening in after the briefing?” Rey asks.

“No, why?” Ben stops his pacing for a moment to look at her. He looks as dumbfounded as she must.

“That’s… almost exactly what Poe said.”

“Well, Poe’s smart.”

The pacing begins yet again.

It’s almost fun to watch him, striding elegantly from one end of the room to the other, as Rey continues her explanation of the plan for tomorrow.

She likes noting the little variations in his movement as she talks — the only real indicators she has that he’s absorbing any of this. His hair bounces as he nods along to her words, his back tenses any time she mentions the Falcon. She tells him she can give him his lightsaber as soon as they’re on the ship and she almost misses the way his hand seems to flex involuntarily.

It’s _almost_ fun to watch him like this… except it’s kind of dizzying at the same time.

“Ben,” she sighs when he completes what must be his fiftieth lap since her arrival. She can feel herself start swinging her legs, some of his excess energy rubbing off on her. “You’re obviously getting jittery in here. We can go for a walk if you want. Remember, this is explicitly _not_ a prison cell.”

Ben just shakes his head.

_I’m fine, _pulses through the bond.

“No. You’re not fine,” she huffs. “You’re walking in circles.”

“I like walking in circles, it soothes me,” he actually manages to say with a straight face.

She knew Leia well, and she thinks she knew Han well enough to recognize that Ben inherited a double portion of stubbornness from them. A refusal to yield that can be a detriment as easily as it is an asset. In the past, that was applied to much darker ventures, so it’s something of a comfort to see it now manifest in a refusal to leave his bedroom.

Or, it would be a comfort if it wasn’t so frustrating.

Rey resists the urge to scream, and instead pushes herself off the bed and steps forward into his little pacing bubble. She waits for him to meet her in the middle of the room before she reaches up and places her hand on his shoulders.

If he wanted to, he could easily brush past her. But he doesn’t. He stops.

“Look,” she says, tilting her head to catch his eye. “You know you’re only making yourself more mysterious the longer you stay in here? I understand you’re nervous. I know it’s a lot. But you want them to trust you.”

He nods and moves one of his hands up to cover one of hers.

“Well,” Rey continues, “it’ll be a lot easier for them to trust you if they actually see you.”

For a second, she worries she’s let her irritation at Ben’s insistence on imprisoning himself in this room forever lead her to pushing him too quickly. Tomorrow is going to be taxing, every day leading up to today has been taxing, maybe today doesn’t need to be as well. Still, she feels a little caught between the knowledge that Ben can make decisions for himself and the inherent responsibility for him she feels as the one that brought him here in the first place.

Right before she can take her words back and agree to him hiding out for another day, he lets out a shuddering breath.

“Can we go later tonight?” he asks.

“Sure,” she gives him a soft smile.

“And can you hold my hand the whole time?”

“To be honest,” she twists her hand so she can lace her fingers with his, lowers their arms to their sides, gives his hand a squeeze. “I thought that was already a given.”

* * *

Finn’s a quick learner, as evidenced by the several leaves floating around him and Rey as they sit in their little clearing in the woods.

It won’t be long before she actually can take him on the training course — a thought which triggers a twist in her stomach.

She hasn’t run the training course since Exegol — technically since before that — and there’s something right on the edge of her mind that makes her vaguely uncomfortable with the idea of doing it again.

It’s the same distant discomfort she feels every time she thinks about tomorrow’s mission. She’d assumed earlier that it was just restlessness or nerves or anticipation, but that doesn’t explain why she feels the same way now — especially since she hadn’t expected to feel anything other than excitement at the prospect of being able to actually _do_ something again.

There’s something else to it, and it frustrates her to realize that she can’t tell if it’s something she’s actively blocking out or if she genuinely _can’t_ pull up in her mind. But it doesn’t matter either way right now — the mission will happen tomorrow whether her nerves feel settled or not, and Finn’s training will advance sooner rather than later by the looks of it.

“Look at that,” Finn gasps in wonder, pulling Rey out of her thoughts.

One of the leaves is no longer simply hovering above the ground. It’s drifted toward a neighboring leaf and has begun spiraling around it.

Rey watches as Finn turns his hand slowly, a little more slowly than he needs to, but that’s okay — they have plenty of time to work on that.

“Good, right?” Finn grins. He turns his eyes from the leaf to Rey and before she can warn him not to lose focus, all of the leaves drop back to the ground.

“Very good,” Rey says. She looks down and decides on a short, thin stick. It rises into the air and floats toward Finn.

“Pass it back to me,” she says.

He frowns at the stick that’s now directly in front of his face and slowly, it starts to move through the air. It drifts shakily, stuttering and stopping a few times.

“Keep going.”

Finn’s frown deepens, he narrows his eyes… and the stick flies away from him, hitting Rey in the chest with a surprising amount of force.

“Oh, sorry,” he says when he realizes what he’s done.

“No, no, don’t apologize. That was good.”

The rush of pride Rey feels at Finn’s progress is almost enough to silence that little niggling fear at the back of her mind that she still can’t put a name to.

“So,” Finn says. He keeps his focus on the stick as it makes its way back to him in stops and starts. “What are the odds of me getting my hands on a lightsaber tomorrow?”

“Not very high,” Rey sighs.

“I’ve used one before.”

“Yes, but that was when there was one to spare. As it stands, there’s three of us who could potentially use one and only two to go around.”

“Oh, right.” The stick does a little twist in the air. “I know you told us he got rid of his, but it’s not sticking in my mind. Guess I’m still just not clear on what the thinking was there.”

“Neither am I,” Rey snorts. “It certainly would be more convenient now if we had an extra.”

They don’t say anything else on the subject, but it doesn’t escape Rey’s notice that this was the first time Finn’s mentioned Ben casually, without any warning added to his words or tone. And that counts for something, she thinks.

They just move back to their little training exercise, graduating from sticks to rocks until they decide it’s due time for lunch, and head back to find their friends.

* * *

An hour ago, the sun began to sink in the sky, washing everything in a soft golden hue. Then came the burning oranges, bright pinks, and soft lavenders of the sunset, mixing together to create their own form of ephemeral landscape.

And now, dark blue has replaced the swirl of colors, with only stars and a moon to break up its monotony.

It’s near enough to full dark, which is why Rey and Ben are walking along the edge of the base, where the trees and the clearing meet, hands clasped together as she intends to keep them for the remainder of the night.

It hadn’t been as difficult as she’d expected to coax him out of the room — he was even antsier than she’d originally sensed — but now that they’re out, he seems intent on making himself as small as possible, which is a near-impossible task. His shoulders are hunched, head down, hand clutching hers so tightly she’s lost circulation.

They haven’t run into very many people at all — they started their walk before the regular dinner time, which is often one of the most lively parts of the day — but Rey knows that will likely change in a matter of minutes.

And Ben’s been mostly silent, only making small noises of acknowledgment whenever Rey points out something about the layout of the base. But she hasn’t missed the several times he’s paused to take a deep breath of fresh air.

Despite his less-than-bubbly demeanor, she can feel the relief emanating from him. Relief at what specifically she’s not sure, but whether it’s at stretching his legs or her hand staying in his or simply not being shot on sight, she’s glad he’s feeling it.

A few lights are starting to turn on all around the base as the night settles into an inky blackness. Soon enough little fires will be starting as Resistance members emerge from their projects for the day, ready for a final meal together before several of them leave for the mission.

“Hey Ben,” Rey says, giving his hand a squeeze when she notices someone staring at them from an X-Wing. “Have you ever seen a porg?”

“A what?” He finally lifts his head to look at her.

“They were all over Ahch-To, but I’m not sure if they’re native anywhere else.”

“Is that some kind of animal?”

“A bird. Except they don’t fly much. They’re just small and kind of round. A few stowed away on the Falcon when I left but we didn’t bring any back here.”

“Rey?” He says before she can keep rambling.

“Mhm?”

“Is this your way of trying to distract me from the people looking at me?”

Rey sighs, “Well, it’s obviously not working.”

“No,” he gives her hand a squeeze, “but thank you.”

He does seem to relax a little as they keep walking, despite the obvious fact that more and more people are appearing and a not-insignificant number of them are sneaking glances their way.

They chat off and on about inconsequential things — their favorite foods and planets, though Rey has considerably less of a scope of perspective to bring to the conversation.

“I think you’d like Naboo,” he says at one point. “It’s very green there, from what I can recall.”

“As long as it’s nothing like Jakku, I’m sure I’d like it,” she smiles.

“I don’t know how you handled living on a planet like that,” Ben shudders a little. “All that sand flying everywhere.”

They happen to near the cave that most people are still using as sleeping quarters at the same time Poe, Finn, Jannah, Rose, and Chewie walk out of it. They’re far enough away that it’s not exactly awkward yet, but as the distance between them closes, Rey knows she only has a matter of seconds to figure out what to do.

She knew intellectually that there was a chance this could happen, but she hadn’t actually bothered to consider what would happen next if it did. Making introductions seems unnecessary — they all know who he is and vice versa — but she’s not entirely sure what she’s _supposed_ to say here. Even if she couldn’t tell through the bond, it’s obvious that Ben has all but stopped breathing as he stands next to her, standing ramrod straight.

Fortunately, the decision is taken out of her hands. Chewie walks directly over the second he catches sight of them. Rey hasn’t seen much of the wookie in the past few days — he’s mostly been sticking with Maz and Lando, catching up and repairing blasters and talking about whatever it is people who have witnessed the rise and fall of so many governments and wars talk about.

She can only see that the rest of the group is trailing behind him for a second before both she and Ben — still holding hands — are enveloped in a very tight hug.

“Hi Chewie,” she says as she wraps her free arm around him. “You’re with us tomorrow, right?”

Chewie softly roars his assent.

She feels Ben relax into the hug next to her. And they stay like that until the rest of the group catches up.

Chewbacca pulls back and the others step forward.

“Hi everyone,” Rey says.

She squeezes Ben’s hand.

“Hello,” he practically whispers, not quite managing to make eye contact with any of them.

“Dinner time?” Rey says in a preemptive strike against any brewing tension.

“Yep,” Finn says. “Coming?” He sneaks a furtive glance toward Ben, but mostly keeps his eyes glued to her.

“I’ll be there soon,” she replies.

Rose looks to Rey then tilts her head up to look at Ben — the first of the group to actually do so.

“There’s— if you want to join us, there’s plenty of food,” Rose says.

Ben goes still, his hand feels like a vise on hers.

“Oh, I—“ Ben stutters.

_Try to relax_, she sends through the bond.

“That’s okay,” he says. “I appreciate the offer. And also… all of this.”

An emotion Rey can only describe as the conceptualization of a wince rolls off of Ben.

“We appreciate what you’ve done for the Resistance and for Rey,” Jannah speaks up. “Just so you know.”

The others nod in polite agreement.

“I’ll join you all in a bit,” Rey says, sensing a natural — or as natural as any of this could be — break in the conversation.

“Alright, see you later,” Poe says to Rey. Then he turns to Ben. “And we’ll see you in the morning.”

He gives Ben a brief nod, which Rey _knows_ is not much of anything really, but it just feels so good to have them all in the same place speaking civilly to each other that her heart does a little flip.

“That went pretty well,” Rey bumps his side once they start walking again.

“You and I must have very different definitions of what ‘well’ means then,” Ben huffs. Even in the low light she can spot a pink tinge forming on his cheeks. “I meant to say… more.”

“There’s always tomorrow.”

They start heading back towards Ben’s room, walking more slowly than is strictly necessary. 

“I’m glad you made me do this,” he says after a few comfortably silent moments.

“So am I,” she says.

Their hands haven’t disconnected once through the entire walk and despite the thin layer of sweat she can feel building between their palms, Rey wouldn’t dream of pulling her hand away a second before she has to.

“Hey, did I tell you Finn asked if he can use a lightsaber tomorrow?” she says.

“You didn’t,” Ben chuckles. “What’d you tell him? If I recall he had some natural ability with the weapon.”

“I told him we only have two. Which wouldn’t be the case if you had held on to yours.”

“I just couldn’t keep using that thing.”

“You know you could’ve just healed the crystal or held on to it as a backup, instead of throwing it into the ocean, right?”

Ben ducks his head at that.

“I thought it was symbolic,” he mumbles. 

“It was,” Rey acquiesces. They reach the door to his room. “But I must say running into a planet full of Sith virtually unarmed was not your cleverest move.”

“No, but it was brave?”

The look in his eyes is almost hopeful as he turns to face her fully.

“Yes, Ben,” she grins. “It was very brave.”

She’s not going back inside with him tonight. Her friends, dinner, and an eventual good night’s sleep are waiting for her. So she lets him open the door before she reaches up and pushes a few stray strands of hair from his face.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” she says.

“Yes.”

He crouches down to kiss her on the cheek and as much as she wants to turn her head and catch his lips with hers, she resists the temptation. Walking in public has already been a lot for him — she thinks it’s best to not do anything else so publicly yet.

So instead, she just grasps his shoulders before he has a chance to stand back up and says “Sleep well, Ben,” into his ear.

* * *

Everyone’s chatty tonight, which suits Rey just fine. It gives her a distraction from the nervous energy that flooded her body the second she stepped away from Ben’s closed door.

“Wait, wait, don’t hog it all!” Rose chides as Poe rips off an exceptionally large hunk of a loaf of bread.

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Poe says, tossing the rest of the loaf to her.

They’re in their usual corner, joking and laughing away as if it’s just a normal night.

And in many ways, it is. This is what their lives have consisted of for the past year together — strategy meetings and ship repairs and shared meals before missions. The only difference now is that the hardest part of the war has already been won and their numbers are higher than ever, so nothing feels quite as dire as it once did.

No one else seems to be experiencing the baffling mix of anticipation and dread that’s coursing through her body. It’s both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, but until she can figure out why she’s feeling it, she decides the best thing to do is push it to the side and focus on her friends.

That’s been working relatively well since she joined them a few minutes after saying goodnight to Ben — someone they’d had surprisingly little to say about.

“I wasn’t expecting him to be so, uh, awkward,” was all Finn had said.

“_Shy _is probably a better word,” Jannah corrected.

And that had pretty much been it. They’d moved on to other topics and Rey had grabbed a spare plate and helped herself to a hearty portion of dinner. 

And now Rose and Poe are play-fighting over leftovers as Jannah, Finn, and Kaydel debate the merits of blasters versus energy bows.

For a moment, Rey wishes it could be like this forever. She wishes she could stay at the base with Ben and all of her friends. She wishes they could just go to some other universe without missions or factions or war. She wishes this wasn’t _still_ their battle to fight.

The thought feels selfish, but it’s difficult not to wonder what her life — all of their lives — would have been like if the First Order had never existed. If she’d somehow lived on a kinder planet and all of them had met in a gentler timeline. If they could have simply been the inhabitants of a world that was already good.

“Okay team,” Poe stifles a yawn. “We should turn in early. Everyone needs to be at the top of their game tomorrow.”

“By the way,” Jannah says as she turns her attention to Poe. “We were thinking, when we get back we should have some sort of party.”

“Not right away, maybe” Rose adds, “But maybe we could pick a night to just let the whole base blow off steam, celebrate how far we’ve come…”

“Didn’t we just have something like that last week?” Poe frowns.

“No, half the base was mourning last week,” Kaydel says. “That’s not the same.”

“Please, General?” Rose sing-songs.

Before Poe can say anything else, Finn cuts in.

“I say we should, and as I am also a General, that’s an order.”

Finn and the girls’ cheers don’t quite drown out Poe’s mutterings.

“How did I not know all my friends are secret boozehounds,” he grumbles.

“Oh please,” Finn bumps his shoulder, “as if you don’t have a bottle of Soulean Brandy stashed under your bed.”

It would have been nice to be born into a good world, Rey thinks as the group bursts into another round of giggles. But maybe it still can be one someday.

Maybe they’re going to build it.

* * *

Hi! We're a little over halfway there! Also sorry I'm so spotty with replying to comments but to everyone reading/commenting/kudos-ing/etc thank you I appreciate you all <3 (also I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/camhope329) rambling about my life and ALSO star wars pretty much all day)


	12. Chapter 12

Rey certainly can’t say this is the most relaxed trip she’s ever taken. Although, truth be told, relaxation is not exactly something she’s ever associated with trips on the Millennium Falcon.

The morning had started on the poor side of okay and gone down from there. She’d tossed and turned for most of the night until finally falling into an uneasy sleep — which seemed to last no more than five seconds at best before Finn was shaking her awake and telling her they had an hour before they were heading out.

That vague sense of dread she’d felt yesterday has been plaguing her since she was so unceremoniously shaken awake, and if anything, it’s only gotten worse in the intervening hours between then and now.

But despite an intensification of the feeling, its source is still a mystery to her.

And Ben’s not doing any better.

She’d found him in his room ready and waiting to go only a few minutes before they were due in the Falcon. He’d been tense from the moment she opened the door, saying nothing but a quick good morning before reaching straight for her hand.

They’d had to take the long way to the ship — Ben had caught sight of the memorial for Leia still being maintained by a few people on the base and had stopped dead in his tracks.

“We can go the other way around,” she said, craning her neck up to look at him.

He’d nodded almost before she could even finish her sentence.

They didn’t have the luxury of semi-privacy the way they did last night — the whole base had been bustling with activity from the moment Rey woke up — and the number of eyes on them did not go unnoticed by her or Ben.

But regardless of it not being their most comfortable moment, they made it to the ship in one piece, physically if not mentally.

“You’re okay?” she’d said as they walked up the ramp.

“I’m okay. You?”

“I think so.”

It was almost the truth.

And then they’d boarded the ship, Poe had given everyone a brief rundown of the plan, and they’d departed from Ajan Kloss with plans to return — if all goes well — in a few days.

But Rey knows that the odds of all going well are never as high as she’d like. And as she’d stood in the cockpit of the Falcon, watching the base transform from a sprawling jungle planet to a small green dot, she couldn’t stop wondering if perhaps she’d seen those trees up close for the last time.

They’ve only been in the air for a few minutes and everyone but Poe and Chewie have vacated the cockpit in favor of waiting in a less cramped space. From the small room she and Ben have stuffed themselves in, she can hear Jannah pacing the halls with Rose, can almost make out the distinct words they’re uttering in hushed tones.

There aren’t any windows in the room she and Ben are in, but she knows there’s several starfighters trailing the Falcon. Ideally, they won’t be necessary for this mission, but idealism and reality very rarely intersect in war. And they are still at war, technically. It’s been easy to let that slip to the back of her mind for the past week, but just because the worst of it is over, doesn’t mean all of it is over.

The dread deepens. 

She and Ben are sitting on the edge of a bunk next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, not touching each other beyond that. His hands are resting flat, palm down on his knees. She keeps her hands in her lap, wringing them so hard her knuckles start to ache.

Their roundabout trip to the ship had been Rey’s first clue that Ben’s discomfort is of a more material rather than philosophical variety. The tentative way he’d eyed the space between the pilot and co-pilot’s seats — the space, she’d realized belatedly, where Han’s dice used to hang — before turning and leaving the cockpit the moment they were dismissed was her second clue. And the way he’s sitting beside her, back straight, looking like he’s on the verge of bursting into either tears or flames, makes it so that she doesn’t even need to ask when the answer is so clear. It’s not the destination that’s put him on edge, it’s the way they’re getting there.

Rey’s heart sinks. Maybe if he was suffering for the same reason she is, she’d be able to help him, but there’s nothing she can do about his actual predicament. And there’s probably nothing he can do for hers either.

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, it’s impossible not to focus on the growing disquietude she’s been working and failing to ignore. And paired with the anxiety Ben’s giving off, it only takes a few seconds for them to find themselves caught in a feedback loop of misery.

Ben shudders — he’d shuddered the second they’d walked on the Falcon too, but not as blatantly as he’s doing it now — and covers her hands with one of his own.

He’s still not looking at her, but he gives her hands a quick squeeze — just enough to remind her he’s here with her. An anchor in what is rapidly becoming a very unpleasant storm. She shuts her eyes.

In this small room, if she tries hard enough, she can almost pretend that everything is different — she and Ben could be traveling anywhere, hand in hand soaring through the galaxy because they want to , not because they have to. That’s not a luxury she’s ever had — to go somewhere just for the pleasure of being there — but maybe someday it will be.

“We’ll go anywhere you want, once this is all over,” Ben murmurs.

Right. The bond. She’s been so anxious she’d actually forgotten it’s been open this whole time.

“Or,” he frowns, clearly misinterpreting her lack of response as hesitation, “I mean, you can go anywhere you want, I don’t have to be there.”

“No, no, Ben,” she flips her hand over, laces her fingers with his, and squeezes his hand. “_We’ll _go. I’ll want you there.”

She feels him relax and an odd surge of jealousy washes over her at the fact that he can be relaxed at all right now. Usually, this close to a mission she’d be fine — focused on the task at hand, but able to function. Now, she’s barely able to think without her mind sending her into a new dizzying spiral of unease and anticipation and excitement-but-not-excitement and fear-but-not-fear. And he’s _relaxing_.

“How are you doing that?” she grimaces at the tone of accusation in her voice.

“Doing what?”

“Sitting here calmly, like you’re not worried at all.”

He doesn’t respond, but he does finally turn to look at her. He catches her eyes and stares at her, as if daring her to look away.

“Rey, what’s actually bothering you?”

“I don’t— I don’t know,” she huffs. “I just think I really want to get this over with.”

That’s not exactly it. She knows that’s not exactly it, but considering she doesn’t know exactly what _it_ is, she figures this will explanation will have to do.

“Well I want to get it over with too, if that helps.”

She’d like to say it does help, but that would be a lie.

“But you don’t seem worried at all,” she says instead.

Ben shakes his head. 

“That’s because I’m not. There’s a lot about today that I don’t like, but I’m not worried about what’s going to happen. And that’s because I trust you and I know I’m okay as long as I’m with you.”

Her heart tries to melt at that, but it’s too frozen with fear to do more than thaw halfway. But she is pleasantly surprised to feel a soft smile forming on her lips, matching his.

“You can’t know that for sure.”

“I haven’t been proven wrong yet.”

He bends down and kisses the tip of her nose as if that somehow settles it.

And she does manage to stay calm for a few minutes. She takes deep breaths and she focuses on the feel of Ben’s hand in hers, and she keeps her thoughts far, far away from the sense of foreboding that refuses to fully disappear.

But then the anxiety returns, and the shift in her mood is clearly felt by Ben, who takes a sharp stuttering breath at the exact moment her deep breathing fails her and the air gets caught by a lump in her throat.

“I used to really like doing calligraphy,” he says after a long beat of silence.

It’s such an unexpected declaration it’s enough to make her want to laugh out loud. Or it would be if he didn’t look so deadly serious right now.

“Calligraphy?” she says, not entirely sure she’s heard him correctly.

Ben nods and she feels her lips curve up despite her best efforts to remain straight-faced.

“It’s just a hobby. I picked it up years ago, long before—“ he cuts himself off with a slight shake of his head that she’s not even sure he did consciously. “Anyway, the other day, you, uh, might have noticed that I was writing when you came in…”

“I was wondering about that.”

“I know you were. You didn’t ask me about it though.”

“I assumed if it was urgent you’d tell me, and if not, then we’d get to it eventually.” The lump in her throat shrinks with every word she speaks. “And we have.”

He smiles at her softly, carefully.

“So we have.”

“Ben?”

“Yes?”

“Are you trying to distract me like I did with you yesterday?”

“Maybe distractions aren’t either of our strong suit,” he huffs in what sounds like a shaky approximation of a laugh.

“Well if we can’t be distracted, we should at least be prepared,” she sighs. “Which lightsaber do you want?”

“Oh, I— I hadn’t thought about it.”

Even without the bond she can tell she’s truly caught him off guard. His eyes leave her face for the first time in a while, in favor of staring at the wall in front of them.

It doesn’t take long for her to realize how unfocused his eyes and how tense his jaw are. He knows, of course, that what she’s really done is offer him a choice between his grandfather’s and his mother’s belongings — a choice between two sides of his family that contributed their own weighty significance to his life. She starts to feel a little guilty for bringing it up.

“I’ve handled both, so I don’t really have a preference,” she offers. “So if you’d rather keep using the one from before…”

“That would be good. The one you gave me from before is good.” He says it a little shortly and then immediately tries to cover it with a tight smile.

“It was necessary to bring up, you know,” she covers her own guilt with a layer of defensiveness. “We might not have time once we’re on the ground to discuss and—“

“I know,” he turns back to her and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “I understand.”

And just like that she sees her defensiveness was unwarranted, because she can feel it. He really does know. He really does understand.

“Come here?” Ben murmurs as he moves his hand from her hand and pushes himself back until his back hits the wall behind them.

She moves to follow him and nestles into his side the second she reaches him.

Like this, she thinks as he wraps his arm around her, she can almost imagine they’re going somewhere else.

* * *

She can hear the rain well before she can see it. The second they enter Akiva’s atmosphere, rain begins pelting hard and heavy on the top of the Falcon, creating a violent, arhythmic beat.

Rey had done a little research on the planet before she’d tucked herself into bed last night, looking up stats and weather conditions and population stats on a holopad. Nothing too in-depth, but just enough to have an idea of what they’re walking into. It’s not the kind of thing she would have even thought to do a year or even a month ago. She’s not entirely sure why she even did it. She just knows that looking up those numbers and forecasts was the only thing that stopped her from feeling like she was going to be sick last night.

They touch down in the middle of a jungle far denser and impossibly greener than that of Ajan Kloss. Rey stays tucked into Ben’s side, her hand clutched tight in his for the entire process of descending, landing, and gently skidding to a halt, not because she needs to — the whole landing is impressively smooth — but because it’s just now starting to occur to her that she’s going to have to let go of him as soon as they step out of this ship.

Everything will go back to how it usually is — how it has to be if they want to survive — as soon as they leave this room. Ben will return to stiff-backed, penitent stoicism. Rey will drop his hand in favor of keeping hers close to the holster of her lightsaber. Poe will lead, and Finn will lead too, really, and Rose and Jannah and Chewie and every person she’s learned to love will once again risk their lives for a war they never asked to inherit.

But the choice to fight, to end it for good, to take whatever steps they must to ensure that it isn’t passed down to the generations after them — that’s the right choice to make. She knows it.

So instead of wallowing in what-ifs and could-have-beens, instead of sinking deeper into the dread threatening to consume her, instead of letting her feelings push through the bond and infect Ben, she’ll do what she has to do — just like she always does. She takes a deep breath and stands up, her feet steady despite the shakiness of her soul.

* * *

The beginning of the mission goes well. Jannah and Rose, led by Poe, go ahead of the rest of the group and get a lay of the land.

Rey and Ben rejoin Finn and Chewbacca in the cockpit just as the other three disappear from view into the dense, wet jungle.

The four of them stand in silence, the tension thick enough to be felt even without use of the Force. The only thing that makes it bearable is knowing that they’re all uncomfortable for the same reason for once. Finn’s barely paid attention to Ben’s presence at all, because he’s far too focused on the view outside the Falcon, squinting as if he can see farther than the human eye is capable of if he just tries hard enough, and clutching a comlink in his hand.

The rain intensifies, hitting the top of the ship so quickly the drops are nearly indistinguishable from one another.

The crackle of static breaks through the silence, followed immediately by Finn’s sharp intake of breath. Rey feels every muscle in her body tighten and then something brushes the side of her hand from her wrist down to the tip of her pinky finger. She looks down just in time to see Ben’s smallest finger completing its journey before settling with the lightest of pressure next to hers, barely touching, but there nonetheless.

“Hey team,” Poe’s voice comes through, slightly muffled by the quality of the audio, mixed with the rain pounding around him.

“How’s it looking?” Finn asks.

“Pretty good. Coast seems to be clear.”

Rey relaxes at that. With any luck they’ll be on and off this planet before nightfall.

“We’re not too far from the satellite, I don’t think. Judging by how not populated things are so far, I’m guessing there’s not too many of whoever’s out here. Actually, I think—“

“Behind you!” Jannah’s voice cuts in.

And then the last thing she wanted to hear through the comlink — the unmistakeable sound of a blaster firing.

By the sound of it, the laser whizzes past Poe right as he begins uttering a string of increasingly obscure obscenities.

And then their nightmarish audio play is lost to static. Rey shuts her eyes, willing herself to stay calm, willing that calm to extend to everyone else in the room. She’s not sure it’s working.

A voice cuts through the static — Poe’s voice.

“I don’t think it needs to be said, but just in case — we need backup _now_.”

There’s a moment which doesn’t seem to belong to time at all where the four of them stand still. And then, all at once, they spring to action.

Finn lets out a strangled sigh of relief as he hits the button that will lower the exit ramp. Chewie places a quarrel in his bowcaster and settles the weapon in his arms. Ben pulls his hand back as Rey tosses him his lightsaber before grabbing her own.

Some small part of her brain that she’d rather pretend doesn’t exist is still screaming at her to stay on board, to let someone else fight this time. But she’s not going to listen to it. She doesn’t want to and she couldn’t even if she did.

Regardless of whether she thinks it’s fair or not, this is her fight. And it’s Poe’s and Finn’s and Rose’s and Ben’s and everyone who stands with the Resistance’s fight. And that makes it hers too.

They run to the ramp. Finn gives the signal for them to forge ahead. The other ships will be here soon. They’ll have backup if they can’t handle this on their own. Because in the same way this is her fight because it’s theirs, it’s also their fight because it’s hers.

Rey and Ben are the last to leave the Falcon. They stand at the end of the ramp, and she doesn’t know if it’s the bond or simply the fact that they both really do think so much alike, but whatever the reason, they both pause at the same moment.

Rey looks up at him, lightsaber in hand, looking so much like he used to but also nothing like that at all. And he looks back, a familiar, blazing fire in his eyes, soft and hard all at the same time.

_We’ve been here before_, Rey thinks to herself. And they have, in a way — a worse way, because she didn’t know where he’d stand once the wreckage settled that time. But this time she does. This time she knows the only way they’ll find each other on opposite sides of a room is if that’s where they both need the other to be.

She nods. He nods back. They ignite their lightsabers.

And then they run.

* * *

A week had almost been enough time for her to forget what this feels like. It was almost enough time to acclimatize her to dulled senses and slower reaction times — or perhaps not dulled or slow, but simply normal. She’d almost gotten used to having time for introspection and thinking things through.

But the second they step onto the muddy ground of Akiva, instinct comes rushing back.

She’s soaked through in seconds. Her mind vaguely registers that she’ll be freezing if they make it back to the ship once this is over. But then that thought is gone, replaced by more pressing matters.

It doesn’t take them long to reach Poe, Jannah, and Rose, who have formed a small circle and are already engaged in a shoot out with several First Order members who are using the trees as cover.

Her pulse races. She gasps for air and breathes in rain. Surviving and drowning at the same time, just like she’s done all her life.

Within seconds, without even having to discuss it, she and Ben split up and take spots across the circle from each other, deflecting blasters with the combined use of their sabers and the Force.

The seven of them advance nearer to the satellite, forging a relatively clear path. After the first assault, they only encounter a few scattered attacks. But the reason for that becomes clear as soon as they’re in view of their target.

A significantly diminished number of fighters than there would have been a week ago stands at attention, ready for battle. They’re all mixed together — commanders and lieutenants and Stormtroopers, their uniforms no longer polished and pristine, but giving off a collective energy that clearly says they feel they have nothing left to lose.

Everything halts for less than the amount of time it takes Rey to wipe the rainwater out of her eyes.

And then it starts back up again.

A week had almost been enough time for her to forget how _good_ this feels.

She takes on anyone who approaches her, acting on instinct alone, trusting it to keep her safe the way it has so far. Her muscles ache, her lungs burn, a blaster shoots past her and nearly skims her arm. She reaches back with the Force and pushes the laser beam away, back towards the shooter, before turning to face another opponent.

She doesn’t think. She doesn’t _have _to think. The Force flows through her, giving her everything she needs. She doesn’t even feel like just herself anymore. It’s as though her lightsaber is an extension of her and the Force is an extension of it — or perhaps she’s the extension. Or it goes both ways. The craftsman and the tool, all at once.

Because she can feel everything within and around her. She can feel herself using and being used. She knows without seeing that her friends are holding their own, she can sense the way Finn is tapping into the Force to help guide his shots, and she can feel that tether, underneath it all that says Ben is here, Ben is safe, Ben is on your side.

In fact, he ends up _at _her side as well. As Poe and Rose advance toward the satellite and the first X-Wing comes into view from above, Rey and Ben find themselves leading the campaign to hold off the attackers.

Now that he’s in her line of vision, she can appreciate his skill with a saber in a way she’s never had the luxury of doing before. For such a big man, he moves so precisely. There’s an artfulness to his swing, the way he moves it through the air and opponents alike. Grace and power all at once, his stance both dignified and animalistic. A lock of hair falls in his face and she wants to brush it out of the way for him, but now is not the time.

A fierce looking woman in a tattered uniform gets a little too close, and Rey snaps out of her reverie and returns to the task at hand.

She fights the woman off with ease — it’s all so easy. Someone rushes her, she pushes them back or slashes at them or throws them to the ground. It’s _easy_. And the more she does, the easier it gets. Everything that’s been bothering her — that sense of dread, that inexplicable fear — it’s all gone, washed away like flecks of dust in a hurricane.

An explosion booms somewhere behind her. She feels the heat of it for a second before it’s extinguished by the rain. Two consuming entities battling for dominance.

“Almost there!” she hears Poe say. “Hold them just a little while longer!”

She can do that. She can do that easily.

Their opponents are getting tired, but they aren’t giving up. That’s okay. She won’t give up either.

Bombs drop and ignite. Heats flares around her.

The sound of blasters firing through and at trees tells her the second wave of Resistance fighters — the ones who stayed on board when they ran out — have joined the fray.

A Stormtrooper rushes her. In another life, that could’ve been Finn. But she can’t afford to care about that right now.

Something crashes and falls to the ground with a thud heavy enough to shake the trees.

The only thing she can care about is stopping them, keeping her friends safe, protecting herself.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” she vaguely registers Finn’s voice growing nearer and nearer until he practically runs into her.

An explosion, louder than the ones that came before it, goes off behind them.

Poe, Rose, Jannah, and Chewie race past. Ben knocks out the last person attacking him and rushes to Rey’s side.

_We have to go_, he sends through the bond.

Right. Yes. They do.

They break into a sprint, quickly catching up to the rest of the group, who even now are being shot at.

Two more men rush them, firing more shots than anyone should reasonably expect to deflect. She does anyway.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Ben duck and narrowly avoid a laser blast.

A surge of fiery rage swells in her, at being attacked, at running away, at the shards of metal falling down around them. 

Another uniformed First Order officer runs at her and she throws her hand out, intending to push him back with the Force. That’s all she means to do, and yet… She feels the crackling in her fingertips a second before she sees it.

Lightning.

Force Lightning shooting out of her fingers in a clear, violent stream. Throwing the man into a nearby tree. Disappearing as quickly as it came.

When Rey was nine or ten years old, abandoned and alone on Jakku, there was a night that got so cold, she had thought she wouldn’t survive to see the morning. It had been inescapable, that cold, freezing her from the inside out, so all-encompassing she hadn’t even had the energy to shiver. She had thought she would never be warm again. She’s never felt that way since. Until now.

All at once the dread and fear she’s felt for days is gone, replaced with a chilling sense of recognition. This, _this_ is what she’s been fearing. This is what’s made her stomach drop and her chest tighten every time she looked at the training course or imagined herself in a battle. And she hadn’t even known until just now.

She feels herself stop dead in her tracks, her own momentum from running almost knocking her over. And she feels Ben’s eyes on her. She can feel him pulling at her through the bond, urging her to keep moving because they’re close, they’re so close to the Falcon and almost all of their adversaries have been taken out and they just have to get to the ship so _please, please run_.

She feels someone shoot at her and she feels Ben push the blast right back at their would-be assailant.

She feels all of that, but in a distant, detached sort of way. Because mostly she just feels cold.

“Rey?”

It’s Ben’s voice that finally snaps her out of it.

She turns and runs, knowing he’s right behind her, out of the trees, out of the rain, away from what she’s done.


	13. Chapter Thirteen

_Two Hours Later_

Rain on a planet like this is normal. It’s mundane. To everyone else on the mission, it’s a nuisance at best and a safety hazard at worst. But to a child of the desert like Rey, it’s nothing short of a miracle.

The air fight was resolved quickly. The First Order’s dwindling number had been no match for the Resistance, who had and maintained the upper hand through the whole ordeal. In a near impossible turn, they lost nobody and only one First Order transport ship managed to escape.

Rey had stood in a hallway on the Falcon the entire time. Poe and Chewie had manned the ship, Rose was on top of any engine issues they faced, Ben sequestered himself back in the room, no longer needed for this part of the mission. And Rey… just stood there.

But she’s not in the hallway anymore.

Now that the Falcon is on solid ground and the fighting is over, Rey has found her way back outside and she’s sitting on the cold metal exit ramp of the ship. Her clothes are soaked through with rain and sweat. Absently, she wrings the hem of her pants and watches a rush of water squeeze out.

She’s shivering, but it’s not from the rain. It couldn’t be, because this chill is coming from the inside out, and the rain is practically warm anyway.

Rey shuts her eyes, trying to focus on the miracle of water falling from the sky, but her mind keeps flashing back to what she wants to think about the least. A sequence of events that couldn’t have taken more than fifteen seconds from start to finish replays in slower and slower motion each time, focusing in excruciating detail on the blur of every tree she ran past, every drop of rain that fell on her face, every splatter of mud that flew onto her legs, every ounce of rage she’d felt.

None of it actually serves to clarify anything.

She hadn’t meant to do it — she’d known that even as it was happening. But the more she thinks about it, the more she wonders if maybe, that's not completely true. If maybe, just the tiniest bit, she had meant it.

She squeezes her eyes closed even tighter and the sequence replays, faster this time and intercut with other images — a desert, a transport ship, Ben in all black staring at her across the vast expanse of sand. And through all of it — lightning.

The hollow thud of footsteps coming down the ramp pulls her back to the present.

“Hey,” Rose’s voice is cautious, softer than it usually is. Rey can’t tell if it’s from pity or fear. She’s not sure which is worse. “Mind if I join you?”

Rey shakes her head. The ramp isn’t really wide enough for them to sit side by side, but that doesn’t seem to deter Rose. She walks down the ramp, past where Rey is sitting, turns around to face her, and sits down, craning her neck up a little to make eye contact.

“I’m starting to think none of us will be dry again until we leave this planet,” Rose says. “Feels nice though. It’s gonna suck if it stops raining. Humidity’s the worst.”

Rey nods. She wants to respond, knows it’s rude not to, but she just can’t find any words to say.

Fortunately that doesn’t seem to bother Rose much.

“I didn’t think a week would be enough time to get out of the swing of things, but that was kind of exhausting, huh?”

“It was,” Rey says quietly. Her voice doesn’t feel like it belongs to her.

“Well, hopefully we won’t have too many more missions like this on the horizon.”

Silence falls over the girls again.

Torrents of rain come down, slamming into already water-worn earth. Tree branches thrash under its assault. Thunder rumbles in the distance. No lightning.

Rose takes in a breath and Rey braces herself. This is the part where Rose will ask what happened out there, or worse, how she’s feeling. Surely, this is where she’ll steer the conversation to the questions she must have.

“Anyway,” Rose continues, “one of the backup generators blew a fuse and I could probably use some help repairing it. Come and find me if you’re game.”

Rey nods again, too thrown off guard for words as a wave of appreciation for her friend swells through her.

Rose stands back up and walks back into the ship, squeezing Rey’s shoulder as she passes by.

Rey shuts her eyes and flashes of light streak across her eyelids. Whether it’s from the storm or from her memory, she doesn’t know, nor does she care.

Rain streams down her face as the thunder rolls.

The storm is unrelenting. But at least there's an order to the weather — rain, lightning, thunder. At least there’s a reasonable expectation that eventually the pattern will stop. There’d been no order to what she did out there, no reason to believe she would ever come to a natural stop. And if it’s so easy to dive in so deep into something so wrong…

She can feel the Force and the rain swirl around her in equal measure. She focuses on nothing but her beating heart until the _only _thing she can feel is the rain. 

* * *

_Six Hours Later_

Poe’s been talking for what feels like a lifetime. They’re all gathered in the main hold, listening intently as he goes over outcomes and outlines their plan for the rest of their time here.

Rey sits between Rose and Jannah. Ben still isn’t cleared to sit in on briefings. She assumes he’s in his room, but she’s been actively blocking out the Force for hours, so she wouldn’t really know.

The majority of the danger is gone. Now it’s all a matter of politics.

Poe and Finn are heading back out in the morning to negotiate terms of surrender, but they only need a few more people to go with them.

Poe asks for volunteers.

Rey doesn’t raise her hand.

* * *

_Four Hours Later_

It’s not raining anymore and she misses it. The air is hot and thick as if all the rainwater suspended mid-air, condensed, and heated up.

_Humidity’s the worst_, Rose had said.

Rose is wrong. Dry desert heat is the worst, but this is a close second.

But Rey doesn’t miss the rain just for the way it broke up the suffocating air of the planet, but also for the noise it provided.

Everything is silent now, which might be okay under other circumstances, but Ben is standing beside her and he hasn’t said a word since their night watch shift began fifteen minutes ago.

She could tap back into the Force, open their bond, and force a conversation if she wanted to. But so could he, and he hasn’t. He has to feel that she’s not connected to anything right now. He must be wondering why.

But he says nothing, so neither does she.

It’s too cloudy to see any stars — the sky is a mottled mix of black and shades of grey. The clouds, already bloated again with water, break up the colors as they slowly drift through the sky. There’s a beauty to the way it all blends and blurs together that she wishes she could appreciate. But it’s all too much of a reflection of how she feels for it to be anything she really wants to look at. Those different shades of dark, blotting out whatever light should be shining against it.

This was supposed to be over. Getting rid of Palpatine was supposed to be the thing that eliminated all those parts of her she’d tried to keep hidden. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t that moment in Exegol supposed to be the moment that eradicated the darkness and replaced it with light? Wasn’t it supposed to be some sort of turning point? Some accumulation of everything she’d learned and experienced over the past year?

So many times, this past week, she’d felt something so close to peace that she’d thought all the uncertainty, all the conflict was behind her. She’d been able to accept, even, that some little flecks of darkness existed in her as long as they remained dormant. And yet, all she’s proven to herself today is that she’s still just a live wire underneath it all, ready to give into aggression and rage at any moment.

She hadn’t even had to think about it. It had just happened, and for the split second before she realized what she was doing — before the chilled terror flooded in — all she had felt was _good_. She’d felt powerful — not necessarily in control, but not as out of control as she’d like to let herself believe.

It’s a frightening thought, but it’s one that she can’t get out of her head no matter how hard she tries. She’s run it all through in her mind enough times to know that for a mindless, blazing instant, she had reveled in what she was doing.

Rey doesn’t realize she’s shaking until she feels Ben’s warm, soft hand cover her entire shoulder.

“Cold?” he murmurs, just as softly as he’s said all of his monosyllabic sentences since they ran onto the Falcon this afternoon. Just as gently as when he’d placed a hand on her back to guide her down the ramp when their shift began.

“I’m okay,” she replies. It’s a bit of a shock to hear her voice sound as normal and even as it does.

“Take this anyway.”

Rey doesn’t have time to protest before Ben’s jacket — worn, gundark leather, certainly belonged to someone else before it was loaned to him as a starter wardrobe — is being lightly draped over her shoulders.

“I’ll do a lap around the ship,” Ben says.

He walks away before she can thank him.

Ben fades into the dark, the back of his head blending seamlessly with the ink black night. Rey has a sudden, clutching urge to ignite her lightsaber just to use its glow to see him for a few more seconds.

She could ask him why he held her hand on the walk through the ship, but couldn’t look her in the eyes. Why he gave her his jacket without hesitation, but walked away from her just as easily.

She could open the bond and find out.

She doesn’t.

* * *

_Eight Hours Later_

She’s sweating when she wakes up.

Jannah and Rose are still deep asleep in their respective beds, having just come in from their watch a few hours ago, and Rey’s glad for that.

She knows how she must have looked, jolting out of bed, wild-eyed and ready to attack, and that is decidedly not the image she wants to give off today.

She can’t specifically remember falling asleep — just getting through her shift with Ben, him walking her to her bunk before whispering a quick goodnight and kissing her on the cheek. She’d been exhausted despite not doing much other than taking leisurely strolls around the Falcon. It had almost been as if the effort of keeping herself closed off from Ben had been more strenuous than anything else she’d done in the past week.

Maybe that was exactly the case.

She’d collapsed into bed, mind still running wild with worries and implications and when she’d closed her eyes, she’d seen flashes of light and thought there was no way she’d get any rest.

And technically, that’s true. She went to sleep, but she didn’t rest.

Her head feels too heavy and the room too cold.

When Rose wakes up, she’ll ask if there are any repairs left to do. 

* * *

_Seven Hours Later_

The fuse was easy to repair, but this is the Falcon — one problem begets another.

Now she and Rose are hunched over their own individual projects in the engine room. Nothing’s so pressing that they actually need to fix it in any timely manner, but if the choice is between doing work and being left alone with her thoughts, work wins out by a landslide today.

This is the closest Rey’s felt to being herself in the past day — a sheen of sweat on her forehead, hands getting increasingly dirty, arm hair singed in a few spots from wires that sparked.

She hasn’t had to talk much aside from offering solutions and suggesting other parts of the ship that could use a tune up. That’s fine. Rose talks enough for the both of them. She flits between stories about their other friends, and trouble she and her sister got up to growing up, and Maz’s latest vague allusion to her storied romantic past with such engaging ease, Rey thinks Rose might have made an excellent entertainer in another life.

All Rey has to do is listen, and enjoy, and get her work done. It feels good to use her hands, to do something physical that creates more than it destroys. It’s mindless work in the best way. Nothing but the problem in front of her exists. Nothing else matters.

So she doesn’t take the time out to check if the bond between her and Ben is still open. She doesn’t worry about the fact that she hasn’t been able to feel him in over a day. It doesn’t matter. Not right now.

Except — if she’s being honest with herself — it does matter. Of course it does.

There’s a screw loose on one of the panels. She really should tighten it. 

* * *

_Three Hours Later_

Dinner is a lively affair. Finn, Poe, and company returned in the evening without incident, having successfully established new allies on the planet while eliminating the last of the threat. They’re all leaving the planet in the morning and there’s a palpable sense of relief. Everyone is more talkative, and more jovial, their smiles a little brighter than they’ve been since they left Ajan Kloss.

Almost everyone.

Sometime between when Rey and Rose had parted to freshen up for dinner and now, someone (Rose, she’s almost certain, judging by the way Rose had offered him the seat between herself and Rey without a moment’s hesitation when he walked in) had managed to actually coax Ben out of his room and convince him to eat with them.

He hasn’t said a word through the entire meal — not that anyone’s really addressed him directly. But they also haven’t seemed uncomfortable at having him here, and even in Rey’s distracted state, she’s able to find herself thankful for that.

Still, it’s disconcerting that he hasn’t really spoken to her beyond a quick nod when she’d told him she was glad he was joining them all.

The bond between them is still closed, or broken for all Rey knows. She’d finally gathered the courage to tap back into the Force when they’d all sat down at the table. She’d thought that Ben might reach out through their connection if he was uncomfortable being in a group setting, looking to hold her hand metaphorically if not physically. She would have welcomed it. But he’s kept to himself as much from her as everyone else. Unfailingly polite, exceedingly careful with his every move, yet separate.

He hasn’t been like this around her in so long — has never really been like this around her, not even when they were enemies. Even then he’d been so open, so _ready _to be open with her. But now…

There’s no use in hoping for other reasons anymore. The answer is clear. It must have been what he saw her do out there.

Poe calls for them to all raise their cups in a toast.

It must have reminded him of the person who destroyed his life, who he fought so hard to finally break free of. How could it not have reminded him of that?

And now that means that _she_ reminds him of it, all of it, everything he’s tried to leave behind. And here she is, not just bearing the same name from the same bloodline, but the same power as well.

She misses the end of the toast. Jannah taps her cup against Rey’s and they all drink, so she must have missed it.

“… and you’ll have to show Finn how you did that. He wouldn’t shut up about that move all night last night,” she hears Rose say.

Ben chuckles softly, faint color rising in his cheeks when he replies, “Maybe not right away, it’s more on the advanced end of things.”

“Well it did look pretty advanced.”

It’s funny, Rey thinks, how just a few days ago, Rose wanted nothing to do with Ben, and now here she is, inviting him to meals and making small talk.

At least she’d been right when she’d told Ben her friends are the forgiving type.

* * *

_One Hour Later_

Rey gets through the rest of dinner, smiling and laughing where appropriate, hoping her smile doesn’t look as forced as it feels.

Everyone finally disperses for the night — Rose and Jannah to their watch shift and the rest to bed. Ben makes it to the doorway before Rey does, but he waits for her — a good sign — and together they walk through the corridors of the ship, back to Rey’s bunk.

They’re standing by the door, only a few inches apart but it feels like galaxies between them. She could reach out and touch him, she wants to, she almost does…

And then it happens.

The bond opens — she knows she didn’t open it on purpose and he looks too surprised to have done it either, so this must have happened spontaneously, some quirk of the Force. But it doesn’t matter. He can see everything in her head, everything she's thinking and feeling if he looks.

He doesn’t.

Instead all he does is avert his eyes and mumble, “well, goodnight,” to the floor.

And Rey’s heart sinks.

And he turns to leave.

And she feels like she’s drowning, and even though she knows that he’s just walking to his room, it feels like he’s walking away forever and something in her snaps and says she needs to say something _now_ and it doesn’t even feel like her own voice when she says, “Ben, wait.”

He stops immediately.

“Come back here?” she says.

He comes back. She waits until he’s standing right in front of her before she speaks again, partly because she’s searching for the right words to say. She can’t seem to find them.

“Was there something you needed, Rey?” he asks, still speaking as quietly as he did at dinner.

“You can’t leave yet,” she blurts out.

Ben finally looks her in the eye, his brow furrowed.

“Well of course not, those were the terms of—“

“No, I don’t mean the Resistance. Well I do. I don’t want you to leave them either, but if you want to leave, you can’t do it yet.”

“Why would I— I don’t want to leave. But if you want me to—”

“Why in the world would I _want_ you to?”

Ben sighs and looks away. She can feel his unease through the bond — thank goodness it’s back — and can tell just how badly he doesn’t want to say whatever he’s about to say.

“Because,” he says before he shuts his mouth and works his jaw. “Because of yesterday.”

She moves on instinct and before he can move away, she’s grabbed his hand.

All of a sudden, moments from the past day flash through her mind, but it all looks different. The edges blur, the angle is higher than she’s used to, she herself features in most of the moments. So this is through his point of view, then.

She watches him meet her at her room to start their night shift. She feels his confusion at finding she’d cut herself off from the Force. She sees the wary glances she’d given him out of the corner of her eye, her nerves sitting next to him at dinner, his inability to find her all day, the way she’d flinched just a little when he’d put his hand on her back.

Rey pulls away. Ben is once again not looking at her, but she can see the tears in his downcast eyes.

“Will you come in?” she motions to the room. “It seems we have a bit to discuss.”

* * *

_Twenty Minutes Later_

One of the biggest perks of the bond is that — when they’re both willing — it makes it very easy to communicate.

It doesn’t take long for them to figure out where they each went wrong in their assumptions from the past day.

“You seemed so shaken when we got back onto the ship,” Ben explains. He’s sitting on her bed, clutching her hand like he thinks she’ll run away if he lets go. “I know what I’m like in a battle. I thought you saw me and remembered how I was… before… and it was just too similar. Too much to accept.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me?” she says. 

“I planned to. When we lifted off, I thought maybe you just needed some space. And I was more than happy to give it to you — as much as you needed. But then our watch started and I realized you’d completely shut me out. My mind went to the worst.”

“But even when the bond opened back up, you still—”

“I thought I already knew what I’d see in your mind,” he hangs his head. “It’s the same reason I couldn’t look you in the eye all day. I didn’t want to see it. Everything’s felt too good to be true and I thought maybe if I just didn’t look, I could hold on to it being that way for just a little bit longer. Because I thought I knew that when I looked, it would be over, and I’d know that you’d finally seen it. That same thing in me that…”

Whether he’s unwilling or unable to finish that sentence, Rey’s not sure. But it doesn’t really matter. She knows what he was going to say. She knows the end of that sentence.

He thought she’d finally seen the same thing in him that his parents and Luke saw. He thought she’d react the same way. She knows without him having to say it.

Because she can feel it rolling off of him in waves in a way it hasn’t since they first left Exegol. Hiding underneath it all is still that fear. Fear that she’ll remember everything he’s done and tell him to leave. Fear that whatever spell is holding her to him will break, and when it does she won’t want to look at him or speak to him ever again. Fear that she’ll send him away.

And she knows, now even better than before, that he would go the second she told him to.

“Ben, I want to make something very clear. I’m not scared of you. I’ve never been scared of you, even when I maybe should have been. I’ve never felt safer than when you were fighting by my side, and that didn’t change just because you got aggressive on a battlefield.”

Ben lets out a deep, shuddering breath. 

“Then you should know it’s no different for you,” he says.

“That is different though.” Rey tries to pull her hand away but he just holds on tighter.

It seems foolish now, to think they’d be able to focus the entire conversation on him. She should have known that some way or another they’d get around to addressing her side of things, considering the fact that he saw her version of the day’s events at the same time she saw his.

She looks away, unable to hold his gaze. She expects him to keep holding onto her hand, to coax the words out of her that he must know are in her mind.

Instead he pulls away, and for one brief second she thinks he’s going to drop the whole thing.

Until he moves so his back is against the wall. He pulls her to him until she’s caged between his legs, back against his chest, his arms wrapped tight around her stomach.

“Okay,” he says, pressing his lips to her hair, “if you can’t tell me, tell the wall.”

“Ben this is ridiculous. Obviously I’d still be telling you.”

“Try it anyway,” he gives her middle a gentle squeeze.

Ben doesn’t say anything else. She feels him breathing behind her and after a few moments she realizes she’s synced her breathing with his. Their chests rise and fall in unison. Warmth spreads through the bond.

She stares at the smooth, blank wall, and suddenly her mind is anything but that. There are so many places to start, so many feelings and fears all swirling together. She doesn’t know what to make of any of it — until she does. Until one specific thought swims to the forefront of her mind and sticks there, refusing to go away until it’s spoken out loud. Her eyes brim with tears.

“You said I have his power,” she chokes out.

Ben stops breathing.

“That was misguided on my part,” he says finally.

“But it’s true. You saw it out there on Pasaana and we saw it again yesterday.”

“Rey, lightning didn’t just belong to Palpatine. Theoretically anyone could—“

“Not anyone. Not a Jedi.” She takes a deep breath and steels herself to say the thing that’s steadily been creeping into her mind, despite her efforts to ignore it all day. “He said he wanted me to kill him. He said that would transfer what he was to me. And I did kill him. And I thought that was the right thing to do, but what if it wasn’t? What if it amplified whatever was already wrong with me?”

“Rey, you’re not like him. You know you’re not.” Ben’s head drops to her shoulder. His lips graze her shoulder. “And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You don’t have his power, you have your own power. And what he did with his has no bearing on what you do with yours.”

“I did the wrong thing out there. That’s not the way a Jedi is supposed to behave. I’m not supposed to be angry, I’m not — I’m not supposed to feel, I’m supposed to be at peace.”

He doesn’t say anything for so long she thinks maybe she’s stumped him. Maybe she’s won this argument — although winning would look a lot like losing in this case.

Then he takes a deep, steady breath.

“Maybe,” he says carefully, “that’s been the problem for a long time — for longer than either of us has been alive, I mean. Giving into rage and fear never ends well. I’ll be the first to admit that. But maybe choosing to feel nothing and calling it peace is just as dangerous.”

His words linger in the air. The rain must have started back up again. A crack of thunder sounds from somewhere far away. Ben’s heart beats against her ear.

“Maybe the balance is somewhere in between?” she whispers. 

Ben turns his head and kisses her cheek.

“I think both of us will be able to find it.”


End file.
